Kleo: Aldo Grasso’s review of the TV series on Netflix

K.LEO
Genre: espionage, dramatic
Direction: They have Hackfort, Bob Konrad, Richard Kropf. With Jella Haase, Dimitrij Schaad, Julius Feldmeier, Vincent Redetzki, Vladimir Burlakov, Thandi Sebe. On Netflix

East Berlin, 1987. Kleo Jennifer Straub is a secret agent of the Stasiwhich after a series of successful missions in the west of the city comes sensationally betrayed by his own government (and by the figure of her military grandfather, in particular) and sentenced to life in prison.

During a beating suffered during detention, in which she loses the child she is expecting, the desire for revenge and revenge ignites in her: the fall of the Wall and the publicizing of the acts of stalking by the secret services will lead her to develop her plan.

Jella Hasse in a scene from the German series “Kleo” (photo by Julia Terjung).

Spy story and revenge: along these two axes moves Kleo, a German Netflix series of exquisite workmanship, which embellishes and enriches the offer of the genre on the platform. Not directly inspired by a true story, but connected to a very likely climate of the time (the opening credits make this choice explicit), the series falls into the classic context of espionage and then turns on the solitary struggle of the protagonist against the traitors.

The reconstruction of the environments (of the interiors in particular) and the interpretation of Jella Hasse in the role of Kleo represent the most successful aspects of this product. For those who love the serial contexts of the Cold War and the aesthetic contradictions of Berlin in the late 1980s.

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