Restless: Tacos: New Mexican Style 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁
/Year Released: 2012
Directed by: Edward Hall
Starring: Hayley Atwell, Rufus Sewell, Michelle Dockery, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Gambon
(TV-14, 2 episodes, 90 min. each)
Genre: Spy Drama
Secrets. We all Have them. Some we hide them from our parents. But a parent might hide secrets, too. And this one’s a doozy.
Ruth Gilmartin (Michele Dockery, Mary from Downton Abbey) is a grown woman, a bit on the flower child side, but a serious Ph.D. student at Cambridge. Her elderly and very stable mother (Charlotte Rampling), has changed.
(Some may remember Rampling’s youthful beauty as the femme fatale who teased Paul Newman in The Verdict.)
Her mother seems paranoid when Ruth stops at her country cottage, scanning the fields and woods beyond with a pair of binoculars, looking for men who might be watching her.
And then she slaps Ruth in the face with her hidden past. She is not really Sally Gilmartin, respectable widow, but Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian who was a spy. And a very good one at that.
***
Flashbacks to Paris 1939 fill us in, starting with the death of her brother, who may or may not have been working for a British security service as a spy. A very handsome Lucas Romer (Rufus Sewell) soon persuades the sister to follow in her dead brother’s footsteps and become a spy. “He wanted you to join him,” he coaxes..
Of course, Eva (Hayley Atwell) walks away but does takes his business card, and we all know that she will eventually do just what the good-looking charmer has suggested.
From there it is off to Scotland for special training, where Eva excels in memory and survival skills. But it is the specialized personal training under Romer – and eventually that becomes literal as the two become lovers – that brings her into the high echelons.
Rufus Sewell excels here with an enigmatic blend of easy charm and warmth that he can turn off at a moment’s notice, just as he did as the dual character John Smith in Man in the High Castle.
And the young Eva falls for him completely, even as he asks more and more of her as he disappears and reappears into her life.
The lure of his charm and her slowly figuring out more and more subterfuge begins to dawn on Eva during her trip to America, where things go wildly awry. Especially in New Mexico.
Death stalks her. Eva looks at a secret message that she is not to see and acts with bold ruthlessness when necessary, especially putting a simple pencil to lethal use like an early James Bond might.
Trailer
If she ever had a chance to catch her breath while dodging bullets, dashing through wartime Paris, Scotland, New York, and Canada, Eva probably would have loved the most exotic food for her, these Tacos, New Mexico Style, “a quintessentially Mexican street food that jumped the border and gained official red-or-green cred.”
Follow the link for Beef and Potato, Rolled Beef, and Chicken-Guacamole delicious variations.
