Chimerica:A Pacific State?

"Journalists seek truth and right now we need them more than ever".

It's true. At least for some journalists. Others less so. What happens when a journalist, photojournalist Lee Berger (Alessandro Nivola), bends the truth (or tells an outright lie) in search of what he believes to be a bigger truth? What happens if he's caught? Will the machine crush him (while allowing much bigger (and more dangerous) liars) an easier ride? If so, how will he find redemption?

All these questions and more are asked (and some are answered) in Lucy Kirkwood's often compelling recent Channel 4 four part series Chimerica, a series I was turned on to by a five star review in The Guardian by Lucy Mangan and one that, if it didn't quite live up to that perfect assessment, certainly rewarded the viewer's patience.

It's billed as "a fictional story about real events" and those events are set both in the present and in the past, both in the USA and China. The basic premise is that Berger is a celebrated photographer who gained notoriety when he took the iconic photo of the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square during the June 1989 pro-democracy movements in Beijing.

Against the backdrop of the 2016 US election, Berger is working in the middle of bomb scarred Syria and making presentations to students, one of whom asks what became of Tank Man. It transpires that both his identity, his current whereabouts, and even if he's still alive is a complete mystery.

All the talk in America is of how Hillary will make Trump eat his "fucking toupee" but as the series develops, and we see images of Trump rallies and learn that journalists (entire newspapers even) have been blacklisted by the Trump machine, the blinkers start to fall from the eyes of our chief protagonists and they reach the point we're at now. A world of 'alternative facts', 'fake news', victim blaming, locking children in cages, and celebrating racism and sexism.

When Berger manipulates an image he's taken in Syria he's accused of playing straight into Trump's "tiny hands" and soon he's lost his job and he's on a plane to Beijing to try and find Tank Man, to save his career, and seek that redemption.

He inducts hard drinking Tessa Kendrick (Sophie Okonedo, excellent as ever), a consultant for a US credit card firm, into the mile high club in the toilets of a Cathay Pacific flight while female flight attendants snigger, covering their mouths, outside and soon she becomes his partner, of sorts, both romantically and in the search for Tank Man.

More important assistance in Lee's mission comes from Zhang Lin (played by Terry Chen as something of a nervous wreck for reasons that will eventually become apparent). Lin's operating in a China where lawyers, journalists, and even bloggers can be arrested and tortured. He drinks so much Tsingtao beer you wonder if the makers of Chimerica have gone in for some product placement but you also think about what's left Lin so boozy, and so jittery.

In trying to tell stories about present day China and present day America while also dipping back to '89 in China (and occasionally to Watergate era-America) while at the same time attempting to show the tale of Lee's personal atonement AND his romance with Kendrick, Chimerica occasionally bites off more than it can chew.

It's not always as gripping as it could be (compared to something like, for instance, Killing Eve) but perhaps that's part of the nature of the political thriller. Chimerica is more of a slow burner and there are some twists and turns towards the end, as well as several beatings for Berger, I absolutely did not see coming.

When it dips back to the eighties it's all news footage of Trevor McDonald, a young Donald Trump on CNN, and yuppies in braces barking into landlines (not brick mobiles?). Lots of the action is set in the liminal spaces of hotel rooms and airports, possibly a cliche now but they do seem like the sort of places investigative photojournalists probably spend most of their time in. It also does that thing that happens in films about the American press where conversations pivotal to the plot are carried out while harassed superiors march through office corridors fending off various queries.

That's how a lot of the exposition is delivered in the first episode. But there's just as much barbed political satire. It's often blunter than you imagine it was intended to be. While it's true part of the reason for Trump's success was the complacency of the Democrats, this point gets bludgeoned home a little too often. There's a suggestion that Bill Clinton initiated the establishment carve up that made it possible for Trump's political rise and one character asserts "I like (Hillary) Clinton. Women hold up half the sky".

Lee's former boss Frank (F. Murray Abraham, who was in All The President's Men so has good form on the ol' international espionage front) complains, as if to exhort us to punch a Nazi, that the problem with liberals is "too much spilt coffee, not enough split lips" and tells a Bernie supporter who's planning to abstain rather than vote for Hillary that the election "isn't a fucking salad bar. You don't get a bespoke artisanal candidate. You choose the thing that's not a giant shit".

It's a nice dig at those whose convictions prevent them from voting against fascism. Elsewhere we hear a Chinese observer to the US election proclaim "an election every four years! No wonder you never get anything done", hear the 'have your say' section that online papers feel obliged to carry described as "a national circle jerk for imbeciles", and see Lee scrolling through badly spelt abusive comments underneath a YouTube apology his bosses have insisted he edit before releasing.

Race (always bubbling under the surface in the world of American politics) is touched on when Berger asks a security guard "do I look like a terrorist?" only to be met with the killer riposte that yes, he does. One of those white power Timothy McVeigh type terrorists.

There's stuff about Vice, Buzzfeed, the dead wood press, the likelihood (or not) of Chinese democracy, corruption in both power houses, and how Chinese investment in US business can help censor stories about Chinese state corruption. These are important, and timely, ethical debates but it feels, at times, as if this washing machine is too packed to spin.

The, often bilingual, action pings back and forwards from China (cue pictures of Wham! playing live in the country, Halina cameras (I had one!), and references to eating tree bark in the Mao era) to a strip club in the Garment District of Manhattan and this sets into stark relief the very real grey and polluted streets of large Chinese cities and the huge imposing and impersonal steel and glass skyscrapers that tower over them.

Elsewhere, it's a tale of hard livin', whisky swiggin' journos that seems to belong more in the world of anecdotes about Henry Kissinger ruining your bosses desk with the unsolicited gift of an oily fish but may, for all I know, still ring true. That said it worked more often than it didn't and I enjoyed it. There were a couple of moments, one bizarrely involving Van Gogh's Sunflowers, that sent a chill up my back and I was genuinely wrongfooted on at least two occasions.

Lee's colleague Mel Kincaid (Cherry Jones) tells him "it's not a crusade, it's desperate masturbation" and, despite having the occasional shuffle around down the front of its slacks, that's not an accusation you could make of Chimerica because, even though it tries to balance various different oddly shaped objects on its head at the same time, it just about retains the clarity of vision to make this both a piercing indictment of the corruption of high level international affairs (now and in the past) while remembering to tell a rollicking story that intrigued on both the personal and the political level.

A qualified thumbs up for Lucy Kirkwood and her wonderful cast with special props going out to Nivola, Okonedo, Jones, Murray Abraham, and, most of all, Naomi Yang as Joy and Terry Chen as Zhang Lin. Pour us another Tsingtao.  干杯.