I meet Kim Jong-il at Notting Hill Gate station. He’s late and blames it on the circle line, that old chestnut… He mutters that if he ran the place he’d have the entire circle line staff and their families shot at dawn. I laugh nervously. I have decided to take him to the Electric Cinema since he is a man accustomed to the finer things in life. We walk down Portobello road and he stops to buy an antique “My Goodness, My Guinness” advertisement poster. He points out every CCTV camera and praises the government for the excellent levels of surveillance he has seen in this country.
I am excited to be watching a movie with a man whose passion for cinema extends to kidnapping a foreign film director and actress to build up his local film industry. We are watching “Revolutionary Road”, I fear it is a little too middlebrow for him. As we settle down in our plush leather armchairs he pulls a bottle of Krug out of his holdall and hands me a plastic cup. He pops it skilfully during a noisy trailer. Throughout the movie he makes smug little observations about the poisonous evils of capitalist society. The movie finishes and I get up to leave, he doesn’t move. I ask him if he’s coming, he doesn’t reply. I leave him sitting there; he seems to be weeping silently to himself.
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