The continuing CMCO means that screen time (as well as book time) is still quite substantial. Cue some more mini-reviews. (They're my way of ensuring that this whole wretched period doesn't become a total memory sink...)

Shadow Lines is a spy thriller series set in 1950s Cold War Finland, when the country was obliged to constantly negotiate between the demands of the geographically closer USSR and the ideologically closer US.

The series had a number of plus points. There are apparently still many localities in Helsinki that look pretty much as they did in the 1950s, which lends the series an intriguing visual quality. I knew little about the Porkkala Naval Base near Helsinki (which the Soviets "leased" from the Finns for 50 years in 1947, but vacated in 1955, in return for Finland's agreement to a 20-year extension of the 1948 mutual assistance treaty), so that was an interesting topic to explore. The series avoids the good guys/bad guys tropes (there are really no good guys anywhere). And I enjoyed the sections in Russian (rapt to discover my vocabulary really has improved quite a bit).

So far, so good. But I confess I was expecting a little less action, and little more politics. And, although suspension of disbelief is to some extent a requirement for the enjoyment of any thriller series, I found there were a few too many points in this series where the viewer's indulgence was strained just that bit too far.

Inspector Rojas: In Cold Blood, which is another Chilean exploration of gender-based violence, doesn't have that problem, since it is based on a real-life investigation into the disappearance of a number of girls from Alto Hospicio, a small mining town in the north of the country, towards the end of the 1990s.

The inspector himself is another of the dark, demon-haunted policemen that seem so much the stock in trade of crime sagas that you wonder if it is actually possible to be both a brilliant detective and relatively normal. He is parachuted into the investigation, and rapidly uncovers a knot of sloppy practice, corruption, and cover-ups.

The backdrop of the Atacama Desert is wonderful, changing colour with the shifting light, and presenting an awesome image of emptiness.


Latin America remains untouched territory for us, so I'll have to make do with photos of the Moroccan desert, 1994...



The series was apparently very popular in Chile, not only because it featured one of the country's most notorious killers, but also because it "touched on very relevant societal issues, such as classism, discrimination and gender violence".

Both in the real-life case, and in the fictional recreation, we meet officials who -- whether out of lazy thinking, or out of desire to safeguard their old boys' networks -- tell the parents that there wasn't much to investigate, as the girls were likely doing sex work across the border, and had left their homes voluntarily to escape the conditions they were living in.

The series evokes various unpleasant aspects of the sex trade that flourished in the area, but doesn't entirely elucidate its connection with the central crimes. This murkiness, too, reflects reality. The suspicion that there may have been hidden links may explain why, 15 years after the arrest, the parents of some of the victims were still harbouring doubts as to whether the now imprisoned perpetrator was acting entirely alone (the police insist he was).

While I watched the series with interest, I did have a few question-marks. Firstly, I wasn't sure about the way the sex trade was portrayed. Too lurid? Overly explicit? Playing to the prurient? Or just reflective of reality? (As this area of the contemporary economy frequently figures in crime dramas, I often find myself asking these questions.)

And apparent again was the difficulty of representing gender-based violence in a way that doesn't victimize the victims all over again... This is the problem with so closely mirroring the events of a "real" case. There's an authenticity that's lacking in many of the "noir" plots. But inevitably you find yourself dealing with real people, and their real relatives. Despite the success of the series in Chile, it caused the families of the murdered girls great pain, it seems. And certainly, it would have been hard to watch some of those scenes if you actually knew the people portrayed.





Still in Latin America, the plot of Rojo, directed by Benjamin Naishtat, plays out in 1975, a year before the coup that installed a military junta in Argentina. This is a prelude to the era of the "desaparecidos" -- the thousands of people (estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000) who became victims of abduction, torture, and execution, and whose bodies largely remain unfound.

Accordingly, the movie is full of disappearances. As this excellent review puts it: "Here is a world in which the owners of an elegant villa have 'left the country', leaving their property to be looted by the polite neighbours, where a local businessman’s rebellious brother-in-law, nicknamed 'the hippie', dematerialises, where a teenager vanishes on his way home from a party, and where a cheesy nightclub conjurer has a magic box that makes audience volunteers disappear."

He could have added the eclipse (and disappearance) of the sun, and the dance performance involving the daughter of the lawyer (whose connection with one act of disappearance makes him a central figure in the film): the sequence shows members of the group apparently being kidnapped.

People disappear in all sorts of circumstances. There is no set pattern. But where you can see a pattern is in the behaviour of those around each incident. As the poster byline puts it: "When everyone is silent, there are no innocents."

Whether it's the lawyer, the other passengers in the van, the magician's audience (who don't understand -- or don't want to understand -- how real the disappearing trick has become), or the neighbours who profit from abandoned property -- all are complicit. As that same reviewer puts it: "[Naishtat] shows that, for those left behind, what also gradually disappeared was their peace of mind, their self-respect and their ability to communicate what was happening or how they felt: an uncanny, insidious erosion of self."

And because there has been no final reckoning in Argentina for the majority of these crimes, the country is still scarred: "Rojo ... is a way of recounting the collective wound that still bleeds in Argentina: like the characters in the film, morality ended up buried under the applause of an abject sleight of hand. It is always easier to look outside of the frame, where each one can make the film that suits us best, in which the villain is always someone else."

The film-maker draws material from his own family's experience: "Researching Rojo was easy because many of the stories are from my family. My grandparents and my father were visiting the city of Cordoba in 1975; they were leftist militants, and my grandmother was a prominent union lawyer. She was disappeared into a secret prison, and her house, my family house, was torched. My father escaped before a commando unit came to his house, and he had to flee. He lived 10 years in exile, which is how he met my mother, in Paris -- another exile. Some of the pictures in the house are from my family."

Thought-provoking, then.

And, of course, there's more awesome South American scenery...