On returning to my room and a
change of clothing and time to view the last part of Strictly Come Dancing with
some very good performances with one meriting 39 from 40 points, and the first
hour of the X Factor before one off Danish Film Department Q. The Keeper of Lost Causes based on a book and which
been followed by two other films although these are not to be shown. Watching
the Saturday evening series in a language other than English has become an important regular event in my life with
Inspector Montalbano my favourite because of the intertwining of the love of Mediterranean
food with his detective skill and the Young Montalbano series has also been exceptional, similarly to the recreation
of Moorse following the death of leading and irreplaceable action John Thaw,
followed by the series from the books of Henning Mankell, the Detective Wallander,
where Kenneth Branagh has also made brilliant English versions of the Detective
and the Danish political series Borgen on Coalition government which ranks
alongside the West Wing for the White House reality and the Yes Minister and
Yes Prime Minister series here in the UK. Romanzo Criminale and Corleone
focussed on the Mafia and separate Roman criminal gangsterism with the Tunnel
also being notable and meriting some writing to remind me of their experience
On Saturday evening 15th
October 2016 hoping to be engaged and taking away the disappointment of not
being able to go and see a play at the National Theatre where I had bought an
expensive ticket and the theatre was unable to give me a credit towards a
future production. I watched Department Q in anticipation but conclude that
there was something nasty about this work, perhaps because it came too close to
the reality of the terror of what being imprisoned is like. Over the past year
there has been a series of films about the taking of young women and keeping
them for the sexual pleasure of one man with currently on BBC TV Missing and
13.
The one off of three films
begins with interest when one of a team of three detectives is murdered, a
second finds himself paralysed, the third who was also shot but survives to
physically recover is relegated to permanently close the accumulation of cold cases
and is appointed an enthusiastically Muslim with a taste for loud contemporary
music. The sense of guilt and failure of the one who survives and the despair and
frustration of second is immediately real, with the urge to get back to work
understandable and the anger and frustration at being given a desk job and
having to work with someone new and cannot possibly understand how one is
feeling
The assistant selects the first
batch of cases with a parade of photographs and which includes one, Carl, the reluctant
boss knows something about the case of a young woman politician who is believed
to have committed suicide disappearing from a ferry leaving her brother with what
first appears to be severe learning difficulties from head injuries in a car
accident which killed their parents.
The unravelling of what
actually happened is thorough and clever and early on we learn that the young
woman was in fact kidnapped and is being kept in a decompression chamber which
limits the confined area and also enables the perpetrator to changing levels of
physical unpleasantness. There is a credible method for of food and water
dealing with sanitation and the provision of food and water but it stretches credulity
that the woman is able to survive this limited environment for year upon year.
The juxtaposition of being a witness to the horror and the brutality the young
women experience and the difficulties the detectives face adds to the tension
which the film creates and where it is clear that the motive for the
imprisonment is not sexual but with the perpetrator insisting on having
voyeuristic pleasures in her increasing discomfort making it plain he is seeking
a prolonged painful death as the outcome but not why.
We learn that the perpetrator as
boy was in a car travelling in the same direction as his prisoner who exchange looks
as one of the cars overtakes the other, and he girl for some reason places her
hand of the face of the person in front thus it is suggested causing the accident
which kills parents, his sister and leads to physical and emotional condition of
the girl’s brother who she now cares for. The boy is placed in a children’s
home and portrayed as disruptive and violent, befriending another, who as an
adult appears to have been a conference with the girl who has become a
politician attends. At least this is the impression first gained as the
detectives identify the friend as the likely suspect as he is identified as
being on the ferry from which the woman disappeared, believed committed to
suicide.
That the detectives commenced
to find out what happened by going out of the basement into the field was never
intended and opposed, particularly by the detective originally in charge of the
investigation into the death. When it is established that the perpetrator has
committed suicide over the side of a small boat, a fishing enthusiast, on a
lake, the two are ordered to close the case and return to the others which the
disobey and are suspended. Fortunately, they quickly discover that the dead man
is not the perpetrator. Because they learn that the brother is more traumatised
than physically damaged, the assistant who is a practicing Muslim, to provide
the obligatory representative diversity now required has the temperament to sit
with the young man until he is able to obtain responses to a collection of
photographs taken at the political event and which include photos of the perpetrator.
The breakthrough occurs when a witness does not identify the perpetrator as the
man at the conference which the brother has identified from the photographs
taken at the political event. It is at this point we understand that the
perpetrator has killed his friend in order to switch identities to get to the
conference after seeing a TV report of the girl as a budding politician.
It is at this point we are
asked to accept another coincidence which challenges rationality, although nothing
like the challenges posed by the film Inferno
which I was to see the Sunday lunchtime. The perpetrator now lives in an
isolated ramshackle farm assortment of buildings with his disabled mother who survived
the crash but was unable to care for him as a child and where his father had
work involving diving and a decompression chamber within the home. The
detectives arrive do not accept the story that he is away from the mother and
leave when Carl realises that the pile of petrol cans means that there is a
generator which has been petrol power in order that the increase in energy use
cannot be recorded but why would the authorities take an interest anyway for
which there could be a number of legitimate reasons.
They return meet up with the
perpetrator who at first denies and then puts up a desperate fight to complete
the murder of his victim, wounding the assistant with a gunshot and almost
killing Carl with a ligature. It is the assistant using extreme violence who
stops and kills the assailant. The woman
survives maintained in a pressure container in an attempt to undo the
adjustments to her body caused by the years of captivity in which despite the
limitations of her confinement she has concentrated on remaining physically fit
and sane. The two detectives are rewarded with medals and Carl told he can re-join
his former team. He declines wanting to continue Department Q with the assistant
and an assistant to administrative and secretarial help and no doubt to provide
the female interest. For whatever unknown reason this did not become the
ongoing TV series similar to Cold Case here in the UK, but there have been two
other ones off films in successive years.
I can only assume this is because of the gratuitous violence used and the
protracted voyeuristic scene making it more a film for the cinema than the TV.
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