No Second Chance: First Place Whodunnit

I'm continuing to feast on the international television and movies Netflix has been bringing us, ranging from Nordic Noir (Dicte and many more) to Cuban cop (Four Seasons in Havana) to Israeli undercover (Fauda).   France is well represented in this, too, with the superb Spiral, which I'll review after I've seen the 5th season on Netflix for free (cheapskate that I am), and Marseilles, which was quite good.

No Second Chance is another French winner, which arrived in France via New Jersey, where Harlan Coben, the American renowned mystery writer, lives and works.   Coben not only wrote No Second Chance, but has a nice cameo at the end, along with Dana Delaney, the only actor American audiences will recognize in this series.

The rest are French, and all excellent.  So is the narrative, which unlike a lot of high-octane kidnap stories, comes packaged with a first-class, whodunnit puzzler.  A father is shot to death, a mother shot and left for dead, and their six-month baby is kidnapped.   The mother, a medical doctor, recovers and sets out to find her baby.

But that won't happen until she or someone else solves the puzzle of what happened in the first place. Suffice to say it's not what it seems to be, as the main detective is just on edge of realizing.   There's a gap of time in the narrative - which was somewhat necessary for one of the crucial developments in the ending - but I think the story would have been even stronger and tighter without it.

But that's a small quibble about a compelling six-episode series,  crème de la crème for international and indeed all television.


silk noir

Four Seasons in Havana: Five Stars

As the new year gets underway, Netflix continues to revolutionize television in many ways, one of the most important being the way it makes available to American viewers (and viewers around the world) television series from other countries and cultures.  In the past months, I've reviewed outstanding examples from Israel (Fauda), France (Marseilles), and Nordic Noir narratives from Denmark and Iceland.   The stories are not only riveting, but when you watch them subtitled (not dubbed) in their original language, you get a chance to increase your international vocabulary over what you learned in high school and college when you weren't paying that much attention.

So I had high expectations when I started watching Four Seasons in Havana - four 90-minute detective stories, rendered in Spanish, made in Cuba and Spain, following the exploits of Lt. Conde - and they were not only met but exceeded. Conde (well played by Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría) is a philosophically minded, hard-bitten but full of heart, existential mid-level detective, wise-cracking one minute, challenging Cuban authority the next, doggedly pursuing the murderer, and always with an eye for a beautiful woman.  He usually succeeds in both quests, but not usually in a way that brings him any lasting satisfaction.

We've seen hard-boiled detectives like Conde - actually, I'd say he was medium-boiled - many times before, but what makes Four Season in Havana different and memorable is that it takes place in Havana.  As is well known, a lot of the culture of Cuba was frozen in the late 1950s, with American cars from that era carefully maintained for decades.  One of the best things Barack Obama did as President was finally lift the American embargo on Cuba, so that snapshot in time is likely to catch up to the present pretty quickly.  This means that Four Seasons in Havana gives us a fascinating glimpse of a Cuba that may soon be gone - and with it, not only antique cars, but old telephones, big desktop computers, more radio than television, and a love of music (such as Creedence Clearwater Revival) that, while still admired in America, has long been old hat.

So in addition to the crime stories being appealing in their own right, we get in Four Seasons in Havana the dividend of the next best thing to an actual visit to Havana, which I now hope more than ever to do myself one day.   Whether you feel that way or not, see the series.


silk noir

Marseille on Netflix: Enjoyable and Relevant

I just finished binge-watching Marseille, all eight episodes released this month in this made-for-Netflix French TV series with English subtitles, and I liked it a lot.  I mean, it's a little over the top with key points in the plot hinging of suddenly revealed family relationships, but the grit and dialogue and relevance to politics today, and probably yesterday as well, more than compensate.

The series was savaged by French critics, at least according to Wikipedia, check it out if you're interested, but c'est dommage,  I couldn't care less what French critics or for that matter critics of any nationality think about a television series or a movie.  Ok, I do think André Bazin's Qu'est-ce que le cinéma is a masterpiece, and I often quote it, but he wrote that a long time ago, and though he was a film critic, the book presents a theory of how film works, what it does and is, and is not a critique of any particular movie.  Regarding those, I find they more often then not miss the mark.

But back to Marseille, it doesn't, and in fact presents what I suspect is a pretty accurate portrayal of the democratic process at work in any city in today's free world, that is, the part of the world that is free, in other words, in which elections count.   But those elections are so subject to such noxious manipulation and deceit on all levels that you can see why Churchill quoted some unknown source to the effect that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others," and the venerable Socrates hated it outright.   Well, Marseille does a riveting, colorful job of exposing just why that is so.

Now, I'm about to start pointing out the special relevance of Marseille to what's going on in the United States today, and I know what you're thinking, and you would be right: Donald Trump represents the worst of the democratic process writ large.   E. M. Forster, another critic of democracy who thought there was no form of government that was better, expressed his views in Two Cheers for Democracy (published in 1951 but composed of material written earlier) - and had he known of Trump, he likely would have entitled his book One Cheer.

Fortunately, Trump has not yet won, and doesn't even formally have the nomination, so Marseille can be appreciated at least at this point as fiction with no quite analog in the real world, joining Boss, Borgen, and of course House of Cards as searing political drama, with lots of sex, crime, local flavor, and good acting - especially by Gérard Depardieu as the Mayor, Benoît Magimel as his deputy, and Stéphane Caillard as his daughter - as well as edge-of-your-seat vote counting.  So, see it and enjoy.

And if you're interested in the connection of Socrates to Trump, check out this little essay, Socrates, Time Travel, and Donald Trump, published just a few days ago.

 

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