This week I returned to one of my favourite cinemas: La Familia in Quillan. I was there to see The Spy Gone North.

Earlier, I had browsed the schedule of films and seen two that tempted me. One, in version orginale English was Bohemian Rhapsody – that’s tonight. The other was The Spy Gone North. The precis sounded good. A man is recruited as an agent for South Korea, and given the task of getting close to Kim Jong Il. It’s the mid-1990s, the north is developing nuclear weapons and there are suspicions of an imminent attack on Seoul.

It occurred to me that there ought to be more spy movies set on the Korean peninsula. Maybe there are and I just haven’t noticed them. This version was advertised as Korean with French subtitles. Someone assured me that, whatever the advertising, the film must contain plenty of English because the leading actors are from English-speaking countries. More on that shortly.

La Familia has a rule that screenings only proceed if at least four customers turn up. I arrived 10 minutes early and was the first. Three minutes before the scheduled start, a second customer arrived. At T minus 60 seconds a third arrived. Bang on start-time, a fourth arrived and we got the green light to proceed.

It turns out there was a mistake in the advertising – the cast were all Korean and the film was in Korean language plus a little bit of Mandarin Chinese. I needed to read the French subtitles. The film was heavy on dialogue and I generally could not decipher the French text fast enough, but I did my best. I focused hard on those subtitles, trying to pick out salient clues. Every-so-often I glanced up to see the pictures. I missed much of the content but still think I took in enough to roughly follow the plot.

The highlight was the entrance to a grand dining room of Kim Jong Il, wearing his trademark leisure suit, preceded by a white lap dog and flanked by loyal soldiers. Clearly he was the shortest person in the room and he looked the real McCoy.

I enjoyed this movie but I regret missing some of the important plot developments, due to my language problems. I would gladly watch it with English subtitles if an opportunity arises.