This high-quality French series, which has so far lasted for five seasons, takes us into the world of modern espionage and secret services. It is obvious that “The Bureau” or “Le Bureau les Legendes” was made by someone who knows very well the subject of espionage and the techniques used by today’s secret services. It is not the content about spies on the trail of James Bond films where the secret agent lives extravagantly, dusts everything in his path and has a license to kill whoever he wants. “The Bureau” seems quite realistic and we see here what the lives of secret agents of the French DGSE look like. “The Bureau” could be described as the French version of “Homeland”, where we follow the fates of numerous agents while they are on secret missions in Europe, Asia and Africa.
All of them have their aliases or false identities, and the creator of the series, Eric Rochant, was obviously very familiar with the matter. This is a series whose action at the time of broadcast was extremely topical, so we follow crisis situations from Syria, Iraq through Russia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran and North Africa, where the main sphere of French interest is. As inspiration for the characters, Rochant was served by real retired French spies who described to him in detail what their lives were like when they were active. The task of the DGSE is to train future agents so that they can infiltrate a certain country under false identities and professions and, after being placed there for a long period of time, try to recruit quality local sources for France.
So, right at the beginning, we meet the experienced spy Guillaume Debailly (Matthieu Kassowitz) alias Paul Lefevbre, code name Malotru, who returned to Paris after six years undercover as a teacher in Damascus, Syria. However, Malotro finds it very difficult to adapt to a normal life, and when he learns that Nadia El Mansour, the Syrian woman he was in a relationship with, has arrived in Paris, he will break all the rules in order to renew the relationship and continue to use the false identity he had in Syria. Love for Nadia will lead this agent through five seasons into various problems and he will end up in the captivity of ISIS, he will be accused of being a double agent and of working for foreign secret services, and in the end he will end up in Russia.
Because of Malotru’s case, his entire department will find itself in trouble and under investigation, and all this will happen while other agents are on dangerous undercover assignments. Marina Loiseau (Sara Giraudeau) is a young seismologist whose first task is to infiltrate Iran in order to find out about the country’s nuclear program. There is also a war going on in Syria, so the DGSE is trying to reach French citizens who have decided to join the Islamic State, so the series itself starts just as it starts to cook in Syria. “The Bureau” covers all aspects of modern espionage, from cyberwarfare, hacking, cell phone tracking, and it’s really amazing where it all went today and how it’s completely impossible to hide today if some services want to find you.
The story develops nicely in all five seasons and there are not many amplitudes in quality, although the last season was somehow the weakest for me. All the same, “The Bureau” is a series that will be enjoyed by all those who like quality spy content, and although a good part of the time is spent in the Paris offices of the DGSE where all the key decisions are made, there are no problems with the dynamics. There are not, at least until the last season, those standard miserable situations in which similar secret agents find themselves in movies and series, and it is obvious that a lot of effort has been devoted to make it seem as realistic and real as possible. Although all the employees of Malotru’s department are also friends, there is no emotion when important decisions have to be made.
“The Bureau” is a great series because it pays great attention to the details, the little things in the lives of secret agents while they are on assignment in a foreign country under false names. It’s fascinating how much attention was paid to create completely impenetrable and convincing aliases so that these agents would not be discovered by other secret services. Here we also see how cooperation between various secret services looks, primarily between nominally friendly countries, as well as how all this information is important for predicting future situations. Rochant himself pointed out that his main inspiration when creating the series was the novels of John Le Carre as well as the American spy films of the seventies, which he tries to follow stylistically.