One Woman, Many Talents: A Love Letter to Kara Milovy
The Living Daylights may be Timothy Dalton’s picture, but it is Kara Milovy’s story, writes Craig Gent. In this love letter to one of the most underestimated Bond girls in the franchise, Craig writes that far from being naïve, she has nothing to declare… “except for cello!”
I was not a typical child. I was obsessed with the French revolution, I refused to take toy cars out of their boxes, and my favourite Bond girl was Kara Milovy.
In fact, barring Bond only occasionally, she was my all-time favourite character in all of the films.
First introduced in The Living Daylights as a cellist and sniper, Kara is re-introduced as girlfriend to turncoat villain Georgi Koskov and a stooge. Bond manipulates her before coming clean, though not before she decides to give Bond up to the bad guys. At the time of the film’s release, film critic Roger Ebert’s claimed Kara was James Bond’s “least interesting love interest”, sadly betraying a lack of curiosity about her motivations, and only mirroring the male characters’ underestimation of her fortitude and power.
Because The Living Daylights may be Timothy Dalton’s picture, but it is Kara Milovy’s story. It is not for nothing that, in his director’s commentary to the film, John Glen described Kara as “one of the most difficult Bond roles” to play. Indeed, with a script directly influenced by the Aids crisis, and consequently being the single Bond girl in the main feature, it was up to Maryam d’Abo to convey a storyline of unprecedented emotional complexity for a Bond film.
It would be belittling of other Bond actresses to say that d’Abo did the work of what would have been three women ordinarily. But it is true that Kara Milovy is integral to the story at every turn in a way that few Bond girls ever get to be, and I firmly believe The Living Daylights would not be so revered today were it not for d’Abo’s performance. Just as the film breaks from many two-dimensional but popular conceptions of 007 – particularly around the character’s chauvinism – Kara’s characterisation breaks the mould that many commentators would have her slot into.
Too often, Kara is seen as naïve, and therefore somehow ‘weak’. But this is only if we choose to see her through the lens of the men in the film – and fail to learn their lessons. It should be a warning to us that Koskov continually treats Kara as naïve and later sees his plan scuppered because of it. Bond also sees her this way, keeping the truth from her – until it almost gets him killed.
That Kara is subject to both Koskov’s coercive control and Bond’s subterfuge is fundamental in people’s underestimation of her. Women’s Aid defines coercive control as “controlling behaviour designed to make a person dependent by isolating them from support, exploiting them, depriving them of independence and regulating their everyday behaviour.” It is a frustratingly common misapprehension that people who are victims of domestic abuse are weak or powerless. This is rooted in an inaccurate understanding of power as an absolute, ‘top-down’ or zero-sum relation, rather than a phenomenon inherent and immanent to all social relations, in which different forms of power can emerge from within relationships – and in which, most crucially, one’s own power can never be extinguished.
Yes, Kara is a victim. But it doesn’t follow that she is therefore weak or naïve, any more than someone who experiences domestic violence is therefore weak or naïve. It is for this reason that it is now popular to substitute the word ‘victim’ for ‘survivor’ – intended to be an active word that restores agency to its referent – not that such wordplay should be necessary in the first place. But Kara’s story arc never gives us any hint that she is naïve or weak, or that she lacks agency or power. In fact, it immediately tells us she is both daring and cunning. From the film’s outset, she is in on Koskov’s plan to stage his defection, and soon after meeting Bond she agrees to fool the KGB to evade their attention despite literally having just got out of an interrogation.
At the root of Kara’s power is her talents. Indeed, they are referred to in the script three times. An inexhaustive list of them includes: fooling the British over Koskov’s defection (recall that Bond is the only member of British intelligence who is not taken in by the ruse), drugging Bond so he can be captured, and – of course – being a world-class cellist.
The latter is especially important because Kara’s cello represents her independence and autonomy within the film, appearing at decisive moments in her story. First we see her play it before she helps Koskov with his scheme, then again before she is picked up by the KGB. Later she is playing it before she decides to betray Bond’s trust in Tangier, and finally in the film’s closing scenes in Vienna on the eve of her world tour. It is also featured or referenced in two other key moments: when she insists upon taking it with her when agreeing to leave her home (presumably forever) with Bond, and when Koskov betrays her, threatening to have her sent to the ‘Siberian Philharmonic’ – which we understand to be a gulag.
Kara’s cello may be widely remembered as an inconvenience: "Why didn’t you learn to play the violin?”. But the irritation Bond feels while trying to fit it into the Aston Martin is fitting in another sense: Kara's independence is inconvenient to both Bond and Koskov at different points in the film. Bond wants Kara to lead him to Koskov, Kara instead delivers Bond to him. Koskov wants Kara dead or imprisoned, instead she ends up foiling his plan on horseback with the Mujahideen.
Moreover, as a representation of her cultural capital, Kara’s cello represents a counterpoint to Koskov’s social capital within the power dynamics of their relationship. Jeroen Krabbe said he wanted to play Koskov as a peasant elevated to being a General, who nevertheless remains a peasant at heart. He has cultivated social capital in terms of contacts and mores – we get the impression that this has been his path to military seniority rather than any particular skills or track record – and he even imitates the tastes of the bourgeoisie, albeit his enthusiasm for fine wine and food seems like an affectation rather than a sincere expression of discernment. Kara lives an ordinary, proletarian life, yet her musical talent – honed on a scholarship – gives her access to opulent opera houses: liminal cultural spaces where, for centuries, social classes have come under one roof to be transported aesthetically.
In the Eastern bloc, few people had significant economic capital – the form of capital that in capitalist societies often forms the basis for cultural and social capital – so for both characters their opportunities for social mobility are restricted to the types of capital they do possess. Even if his pretensions to cultural capital seem phoney, Koskov wields his social capital over Kara and uses it as part of a charm offensive. She is led to believe Koskov and, by association, Whittaker (“Georgi told me he’s a patron of the arts”) are crucial to her success, rather than her own talents and work. It is painful to us as viewers that Kara believes she owes him everything, and that – like many women – she goes back to him for a time.
But it is significant that, as the audience, we suspect that Kara did not really need Koskov all along. It is clear to us that she has talents in her own right. Like Bond, she is a skilled worker. And unlike Koskov, we understand that Bond appreciates her skills. When he tells her that her performance of Borodin’s String Quartet in D Minor was exquisite, there is no question that he is being sincere, almost saying the words with an empathy that suggests Bond himself occasionally feels underappreciated. When Koskov finally betrays Kara, ordering her to be sent to the gulag, he shows his resentment for her cultural capital, suggesting her talents will fit in with the Siberian Philharmonic’s “bourgeois repertoire”. When Kara plays Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations in Vienna at the end of the film, it is an irreverent retort to Koskov: the style of the piece imitates French rococo – a famously vapid and ornate artistic style associated with the pre-revolutionary ancien régime.
The film’s ending – which is her ending, not Bond’s – shows Kara in a new city, with a new visa (“you can come and go as you like,” M tells her), about to embark on a world tour all of her own (seriously, to any supporters of my work – I need that poster). It is a fairytale ending for a character who has, time and time again, scraped through on the basis of her own resilience and strength.
Why did a fairytale of a talented victim of coercive control who chased, rode, drove and flew her way to social and geographic mobility appeal to a bright, working-class bisexual boy who grew up witnessing domestic violence in a small-minded town? If you’re asking with your head, there’s a Licence to Queer Re-view that might clear one or two things up.
But if you’re asking with your heart, I suppose it’s like this:
It would be easy to say Kara Milovy’s story made me believe anything was possible. But it wouldn’t be true. Speaking as someone who grew up on free school meals and went as far as it’s possible to go in education, landing back in my hometown with a bump (and no job) taught me that social mobility is a pernicious, if persuasive, lie. And unlike many LGBTQ people, the geographic mobility of my late teens and early twenties seemed to delay rather than expedite my acceptance of my sexuality.
Rather, Kara Milovy made me believe that whatever life throws at you, we always have decisions that are ours, and that we can make for ourselves. We have power, autonomy, and agency. We don’t have to lose ourselves to the events that rocket into our lives or emerge all around us like the water of an icy lake. We can always – and must always – insist on bringing the cello.
I’m glad I was not a typical child, and I have written before about how James Bond taught me, perhaps unexpectedly, that I did not have to be a typical man. For that, I will always love him. But for teaching me the importance of retaining, at the most crucial moments in life, my sense of self, my passions; of never diminishing my talents; of insisting on the cello. For that, I will always love Kara Milovy.
Craig Gent (right in photo) is a bisexual Bond fan, writer and Licence to Queer contributor based in Leeds, Yorkshire. By night he blogs at Alone on the Front Row and tweets at @aloneinthefront. By day he is a problem eliminator with Novara Media, a people-powered media organisation. His first book is due in spring 2024 with Verso Books.
