The Last Duel (2021)

Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, a marvellous historical costume drama that is all too rare in Hollywood these days, is based on a true story that took place in 14th century France, and for those interested, there’s a book, with the same title, by Eric Jager. The premise is that two men, former friends, fought to the death in a trial by duel when one man was accused of raping the wife of the other. If the husband lost, then it would ‘prove’ that the wife was lying, and she would subsequently be burned alive at the stake. If the husband won, well that would prove the wife told the truth. Women were property, so the rape of a woman was a crime against her husband, damn it.

The film opens with the famous duel about to take place and then the film segues into past events and exactly what led these two men, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver) to this moment in time. The film is divided into three sections with the story told by its three main characters: Carrouges, le Gris and Marguerite de Carrouges. There’s some repetition–not much though thanks to some scene variation, and while you’d expect three wildly differing versions: he said/he said/ and she said, events are startlingly similar.

The film depicts the men starting as comrades in arms, friends, but then division gradually erodes the relationship. Carrouges, a vassal of Comte Pierre d’ Alençon (Ben Affleck) is a great warrior but his impetuosity gets him into trouble while fighting at Limoges. Alençon dislikes Carrouges–not just for his disobedience but also because he considers him to be a clod: dull and boring. At the same time, witty le Gris begins to find favour with Alençon. Alençon is depicted as decadent, hosting orgies at his castle after his wife, usually pregnant, is safety dismissed to bed. The atmosphere at the castle goes a long way to explaining le Gris’ behaviour and attitude towards Marguerite de Carrouges. The message is that Alençon likes to be entertained: bring on the women and bring on le Gris.

One of le Gris’ jobs is to collect levies for Comte d’ Alençon, and that takes him to Carrouges’s castle for payment and later, significantly, to the home of the Robert de Thibouville, the father of Marguerite.

As Carrouges falls in life, le Gris is continually promoted, and their destinies are irrevocably linked long before Marguerite (Jodie Comer) enters the picture. Carrouges needs money after the expected captaincy of a castle, which has been held by the de Carrouges family for generations, falls … yes, you’ve got it … to le Gris. Marguerite, a tremendously sympathetic character, the daughter of a forgiven traitor, comes with a sizeable dowry, plus she’s beautiful to boot. Their marriage is punctuated by er husband’s absences and vicious little moments with her mother-in-law. Marguerite becomes a playing card in the rivalry of these two men, and after le Gris sees Marguerite, he becomes obsessed with her. He steals to Carrouges’s home when Marguerite is alone and there brutally rapes her, and the cad has the audacity to finish, with a toss of his head, claiming that “we could not help ourselves.” In le Gris’ mind, she wanted it just as much as he did.

This is a true story, one so incredible that a fiction writer would probably shy away from its twists of fate, thinking that so many links would be unbelievable, and yet laid out for the film (and no doubt the book) it’s so easy to see that these two men were on a collision course from which only one would walk away. There’s some bad press out there about bad hair and it’s true that Matt Damon sports a mucky mullet while Ben Affleck has bleached blonde hair, but these little asides evaporate in the story’s power. The film’s splendid cinematography pulled me into the grimy world of 14th century France. Bleak castles, flames on bloody battlefields, wars that decimated families and promoted favourites. Small details underscore the story’s power: such as Marguerite’s little feet chained to the seat from where she watches the duel.

In light of the rape charge, Marguerite is abandoned by her friend, constantly picked at by her vicious mother-in-law, and grilled in the courtroom. Jodie Comer delivers a shimmering yet marvelously subdued performance of a woman who faced death by burning at the stake if her husband lost the duel. My big question: how did le Gris know to go to the Carrouges castle when Marguerite was alone? Was she set-up by her mother-in-law? Did le Gris have spies? Anyway, for historical drama fans, this is one to watch.

The Chef’s Wife (2014)

The Chef’s Wife /On a failli être amies (2014) from director Anne Le Ny is a frothy tale of marital discontent, deceit and betrayal, In spite of the brevity of the material, the film which doesn’t take itself too seriously, is light and even funny at times.

Career counselor Marithé Bressy (Karin Viard) loves her job and looks forward to placing former factory workers in new jobs. Carole Drissi (Emmanuelle Devos) slips into the room full of displaced factory workers but then leaves before Marithé can interview her. Marithé is later surprised to see Carole at the extremely upscale restaurant, Le Moulin Blanc and shocked to learn that Carole is married to the chef/owner Sam (Roschdy Zem). This unexpected meeting leads to the first lie of many in this tale. Carole tells her husband that she met Marithé in gym class, and Marithé goes along with it, covering for Carole.

Initially it’s difficult for Marithé to understand why Carole, who seems to have a good life, sought help from a job counselor, but subsequent meetings between the two women reveal Carole’s deep discontent. She’s tired of always being in her husband’s shadow, living his goals, and longs to break out on her own. Marithé becomes personally involved in helping Carole break into a new career, but as Marithé, who is divorced, eyes Carole’s situation and her husband, it’s obvious that her interest in pointing Carole into a new life–which includes a divorce–is based in self-interest. As the plot thickens, it becomes clear that Carole’s life is complex, and she soon embroils Marithé in even more deceit. So we have Carole lying to her husband, and Marithé lying to Carole. Carole is under the impression that Marithé, who covers many lies and even provides alibis, is her friend, but that’s far from the truth. This is essentially a story of back-stabbing but comic moments lessen the toxins. Of course with all this lying afoot, the truth will out at some point.

Of course, this is on one level an old story–two women who want the same man. Yet does Carole really want Sam anymore? She starts by saying she wants a new career but then the rot of her marriage is slowly revealed. I liked this film for the way it showed how easy it is to envy someone’s life from the outside. Marithé thinks Carole has everything, yet one scene show Sam snapping at Carole in the kitchen in front of the staff. Carole feels suffocated by Sam and HIS life. The film also illustrates how easy it is to go off the straight and narrow–one first step is all it takes and that’s what we see here. Marithé starts breaking her professional rules and soon she’s completely off the rails.

A Second Chance (2014)

In Susanne Bier’s morally complex film, A Second Chance, police officers Andreas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Simon (Ulrich Thomsen) are called to a domestic violence dispute involving sadistic, volatile ex-con Tristan (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and his battered girlfriend, Sanne (May Andersen). Andreas discovers Sanne’s baby, Sofus, stuffed in a cupboard covered with feces. Andreas, a new father, is disgusted at the squalor the baby lives in, and he’s even more disgusted when he learns that since the mother is not a druggie (unlike Tristan) and the baby is not malnourished, Sofus cannot be removed into protective care. This incident causes Andreas to go home early and give his baby, Alexander, who is about the same age as Sofus, extra affection that night.

Andreas is married to Anna (Maria Bonnevie) and they have the perfect life. Anna has always longed for a baby, and their lakeside home, covered with lights and candles is a wonderful place to raise a child. Alexander wakes a lot at night and cries, and Andreas takes turns with the baby at night in order to give his wife a break. One night, Anna wakes to discover that Alexander is dead. Andreas wants to call an ambulance but Anna, in hysterics, begs him not to. Andreas gives Anna sleeping pills to calm her down and she swears that if the baby is gone when she wakes up, she will commit suicide. And here’s where Andreas goes off the rails: he breaks into Tristan and Sanne’s apartment (they are both drugged up to the eyeballs) and he steals Sofus, leaving Alexander in his place.

It was initially difficult to watch Tristan higher than a kite, beating Sanne, but since this is a Susanne Bier film, I stuck with it, and am glad I did. There are many mixed reviews of this film out there, but since I love a good moral dilemma story, I loved this film. The plot is reminiscent of Dostoevsky in its tangled moral complexity, and Andreas’s life goes from bad to worse.

Simon, Andreas’s partner, whose life is a mess following his divorce, begins to smell a rat, but it is impossible to guess the twists and turns this story takes on its way to its ending. This tale of moral redemption stresses that one cannot interrupt the life path of any other individual; we have not the right. After chewing the film over, I decided that Andreas, who switched out the babies so quickly, did so partly as he was struggling with the idea that these 2 boys, so close in age, faced such different futures. He could not save his son, so he chose to save Sofus. Anyway, for this viewer, an absolutely brilliant film–although not easy to watch. Tristan’s performance as the druggie with this ‘brilliant fix-it plan’ was incredible.

ZeroZeroZero (2020)

Based on Roberto Saviano’s book, the 8 part series ZeroZeroZero takes a look at the drug trade through the lens of production to delivery. We are not talking about street sales, no we are talking about the shipment of millions of dollars worth of drugs.

The series begins in Calabria, Italy with the emergence of frail, elderly Don Minu (Adriano Chiaramida) from his spartan, yet high-tech under-ground bunker. Don Minu emerges to offer a deal to a rival family. He will buy a large amount of cocaine and offer it at a specified price to his enemies. Don Minu’s grandson, Stefano (Giuseppe De Domenico) isn’t keen on his grandfather’s meeting with his rivals, and while at first this seems like concern, it becomes clear that Stefano hates his grandfather and plots his downfall.

Then in Monterrey Mexico, the Leyra brothers, Jacinto (Flavio Medina) and Enrique (Víctor Huggo Martin) distribute cocaine while hosting lavish parties at their magnificent mansion/compound and whooping it up at the finest restaurants. But the special forces are hot on the trail of the Leyra brothers, determined to bring them down. While capturing and torturing narcos may yield info about the Leyras, they always manage to slip away. ….

Manuel (Harold Torres), a stone-faced church-goer leads his elite squad in his hunt for the Leyras. But Manuel has another agenda which gradually becomes clearer as the series continues.

So we have buyers in Italy and sellers in Mexico. The American Lynwood family, patrirach Edward (Gabriel Byrne) and his 2 adult children, Chris (Dane DeHaan) and Emma (Andrea Riseborough) are brokers, and they broker a deal between Don Minu and the Leyras with the proviso that the large shipment of cocaine will be transported via one of their freighters.

But it’s a long way from Italy to Mexico and things immediately begin to go wrong. …

This is a brilliant and brutal multi-faceted look at the drug trade. At the top of the food chain are the Leyras who are secure and smugly self-assured, and we see their operations at the street level and in the cocaine prep factories where women stripped down to their underwear, package the white powder. Class plays a huge role in this section of the tale with the fat-cat Leyras lording it over those they consider their social inferiors.

It’s fascinating to see the Italian side of things with rival families intent on vengeance. What’s up with all the pigs and for the squeamish, be warned there’s a graphic scene involving a pig slaughter.

The episodes go back and forth between Italy, Mexico and the US, but as the drugs are transported and dangerous complications arise, the focus shifts to Senegal and Morocco.

While we get into the depths of human character, Chris for example, suffers from Huntington’s disease, the emphasis here is power, profit and control. Many lower level characters are executed or killed as the cocaine makes its way to Italy, and there’s the sense that these people, some soldiers in the war on drugs, narcos, and innocent bystanders are all grist for the drug trade. These are people who are willing, or desperate enough to take terrible risks for the money that dribbles their way. Corruption cannibalizes all.

There are a couple of times, incidents take place and there’s a temptation to think that this or that wouldn’t happen, but all I’ll say is that if things seem improbable, it’s only because this jaw-dropping story hasn’t finished yet …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HoRfUKcvdY

Lady J (2018) Mademoiselle de Joncquières

“Haven’t you observed that love grows when the object of desire escapes us?”

Lady J, a French film set in the 18th century, opens at the vast, beautiful country estate of Madame de La Pommeraye (Cécile de France), a beautiful wealthy widow. She’s elegant, intelligent and very much at ease in her skin. She is courted by a practiced lothario, a man with a terrible reputation as a serial womanizer, Le Marquis des Arcis (Edouard Baer). He’s a classic seducer, smooth, disarming, and disingenuously claiming “I seduce no one, I am always the first to be seduced.” Madame de La Pommeraye has so far managed to keep the Marquis at a distance, mainly by not taking him seriously; she’s determined not to become another of his many discarded women. But he’s persistent, and eventually she succumbs to his charms which he adapts to his prey: in this case he uses the intellectual approach.
While the affair lasts longer than most of his dalliances, soon the marquis grows bored and finds excuses to leave. We can only imagine what this sexually rapacious scalawag is up to, but finally Madame de La Pommeraye, always a woman of calm reason, plays her cards first by pretending that she’s bored with the affair. With obvious relief, the Marquis confesses that he feels exactly the same way too, and so they part, friends.

You really have to laugh at the Marquis when he gives his version of events: how he’s such a victim of love. Well you could laugh if he didn’t careen around Europe looking for women to seduce and ruin.

Since the Marquis and Madame de La Pommeraye always shared an intellectual relationship, she continues to cultivate this friendship, encouraging his confidences and laughing at the silliness of the string of women who believed his promises of love, fidelity and possibly even marriage.

Under the facade of friendship, she stays in the Marquis’ life but claiming she’s striking a blow for all women, Madame de La Pommeraye plots revenge. She employs a woman (Natalia Dontcheva) who was deceived into a false marriage and who has had to resort to prostitution to make a living. In this life she is accompanied by her beautiful, very young daughter (Alice Isaaz). Madame de La employs the mother and daughter team to pose as reclusive, modest, strict religious women and then sets the daughter as bait in front of the marquis. Since this is a man who loves a challenge, (“the Marquis cannot resist what resists him”) he falls into an elaborate trap.

This tale of cold, merciless and carefully plotted revenge is elegantly filmed with a languid pace that belies the storm of passions that simmer beneath those gorgeous 18th century costumes. She’s warned by her loyal friend, Lucienne (Laure Calamy) not to take the revenge too far, but Madame de La Pommeraye, who has been badly wounded, enjoys watching the Marquis squirm and so the little charade continues…

The film’s main argument is that our actions have unpredictable consequences. After watching the film, I wondered why Madame de La Pommeraye tolerated the Marquis in the first place. Did she find his attention flattering? She knew exactly what he was; marriage wasn’t on the table, and the Marquis abandoned his promiscuous life style at least for a while, so were both characters seducers in their own fashion? If you enjoy the philosophical films of Eric Rohmer, then you should enjoy Lady J. Yes it’s about passion and sex and seduction (think Les liaisons Dangereuses), and it’s all elegantly done, scene by scene so that the piece seems to be a play rather than a film with a focus on the philosophical. The plot is based on a story from Jacques the Fatalist.

Directed by Emmanuel Mouret

 

Osenniye Kolokola:The Bells of Autumn (1979)

I’ve been curious about Soviet adaptations of Pushkin’s fairy tales for some time, but I decided to finally break the ice and watch one. As it turns out, I’m glad I did; Russico’s edition of The Bells of Autumn (Osenniye Kolokola) is a treat to watch, and the dvd extras alone made the purchase worthwhile. The film is based on the Pushkin story The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights.

The film is beautifully framed with the traditional “once upon a time” and then the film segues into this fairy tale of a Tsar so bored he decides to take a trip around the world. Several scenes depict the Tsar being received as a guest in various courts around the world. The dialogue is minimal and several of the foreign scenes get around dialogue by mime instead.

While the Tsar (Aleksandr Kirillov) is off on his adventures, the Tsarita (Irina Alfyorova) pines for him during his absences. Many times she ventures off out into the snow and gazes off in the distance hoping to see him return. In one of his exotic ports of call, the tsar is given a jeweled looking-glass as a gift and when he gazes in the glass, he sees his wife’s reflection, This sends him back home but it’s not a moment too soon.

The Tsarita dies just as her husband returns and he now has a child to raise. He remarries and the princess is raised by the tsar and the new wife. Eventually, a marriage is arranged for the princess to a prince, but around this time the stepmother, a vain woman, discovers the mirror’s special powers .

If this sounds like Sleeping Beauty, well you’d be right. It’s Sleeping Beauty with a Slavic twist, so instead of dwarves we get knights.

The film is only 63 minutes long, and once I recognised the Sleeping Beauty tale, I didn’t exactly expect any surprises. That said, I can’t dismiss this film as for children only. I loved it, and found it really quite beautiful.

The film comes with quite a few extras and includes an interview with actor G. Martirosyan, filmographies and a photo album. However, by far the most valuable extra was the details regarding the creation of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. Pushkin notebooks were displayed–along with the considerable editing of the text and drawings he made in the margins. Clips even included views of Pushkin’s drawings of his wife and also the Decembrists. Pushkin’s original text was shown (in his handwriting) and then the edits appeared on screen. The narrator explained that Pushkin’s work was subject to censorship. For Pushkin aficionados, this DVD extra is above price.

From director Vladimir Gorriker

Dogs of Berlin (2018)

“A dog’s got no choice. A dog squats to take a shit and thinks it’s made a decision. The question is: the dog owner. Is it that much different for him? Do we really have a choice? Was everything decided at our birth?”

Dogs of Berlin is a dark, gritty ten part German TV series which opens (after a sex scene) with the discovery of a body in the East Berlin Marzahn district.  This is an area of massive apartment buildings originally designed as a model city but now a miserable ugly reminder of East German communism, a region riddled with crime and drugs.

Married Homicide detective Kurt Grimmer (Felix Kramer) happens to be visiting his girlfriend Bine (Anna Marie Lühar) when in a post coital moment, he notices something afoot in this troubled neighbourhood. His cop instincts kick in and he strolls over, carrying one of Bine’s horribly neglected children. He encounters two green cops who say that they’ve discovered a body. Grimmer tells the two patrol cops (including a very eager female cop) to wait there while he investigates. Grimmer identifies the body of a Turkish football player who plays for the German team. Since this is the night before a World Cup match, Grimmer realises that the death of Orkam Erdem, who received death threats, is fraught with potentially violent consequences. Neo Nazis loathe Erdem for playing on the German team, and some Turks feel that Erdem is betraying his own people–especially since he’s scheduled to play against Turkey the next day.

Here’s where the story begins to deepen:

Grimmer, who used to be a Neo Nazi, and still carries the tattoos, is a betting man. It’s an addiction, and he already owes big time. He begins to calculate that, with this knowledge of Erdem’s death, he could win and clear his debts if he can keep the knowledge under raps and bet against the demoralized German team….

What could go wrong?

As this addictive, edge-of-your-seat drama continues, we see a troubled panoramic view of life in this East German borough. Grimmer’s plan sounds good, but there are so many players with various agendas in this tale of ruthless gang violence, that his plan becomes increasingly difficult to carry out.

Add to the mix, Grimmer’s tightly-wound wife Paula (Katharina Schüttler) who runs the Grimmer middle class home, and owns a small shop full of knick-knacks. The shop runs at a loss, and Grimmer’s been picking up the tab with his betting winnings. Paula has no clue that Grimmer visits drug-addled, online sex worker Bine, a woman from his Neo-Nazi past.

Then there’s the fearsome Tarik-Amir clan run by the psychotic Hakim (Sinan Farhangmehr) from his heavily armed apartment compound which sits inside the no-go-zone. Hakim’s younger brother Kareem (Kais Setti) isn’t interested in the drug side of the clan’s operations, he’s into betting and forms an uneasy alliance with Kovac (Misel Maticevic) who runs the bookies and the betting shops.

Then there’s the Neo-Nazi clan Grimmer left: Grimmer’s brother Ulf (Sebastian Zimmler) and mother Eva (Katrin Saβ) are still very much part of the brotherhood. There’s one great scene when the Neo Nazis cheer a black player who scores a goal for the German team, and then they realise that hey this a black player, so they can’t cheer.

Finally, gay Turkish cop Erol Birkham (Fahri Yardim) is asked to team up with Grimmer to solve the murder of the Turkish football player. It’s an uneasy alliance with Grimmer’s prejudices and betting shenanigans spilling over into the case. There’s a large cast of secondary and tertiary characters too, but I won’t go into that for various reasons. And as for the title, dogs are woven brilliantly into this tale.

Dogs of Berlin is fantastic. Its dark portrayal of  a complex world of tangled loyalties, violent crime and racial hatred is riveting. Grimmer makes a fascinating antihero and you can’t help but hope he succeeds even though his behaviour is, at times, appalling. He leads a double life, moving between law enforcement and law breaking. Most comfortable with the dark seedy side of life,  he’s a user, and this is exemplified in his treatment of Bine. Here’s this drug addict who works as an online sex worker from her home; her children have to fend for themselves, and yet Grimmer doesn’t hesitate to take every penny this woman has, and she’s happy to give it–even though this decision has dire consequences. Over the course of the series, we see that Grimmer is a user of people, a black hole, and everyone in his orbit is sucked into his darkness.

Dogs of Berlin: Fantastic cinematography, impeccable acting, a relentlessly dark script in which everything is worse, far more corrupt and twisted than you think. What more can you ask for? The conclusion left the possibility of a second series, so lets hope we see it.

I, Tonya (2017)

I was skeptical about watching Craig Gillespie’s film I, Tonya mainly because I’m not overly fond of the mockmentary style, but after watching this marvelous, darkly comic  film, I realise that it couldn’t have been made any other way. In case readers don’t remember the scandal, Jeff Gillooly, the ex-husband, of Olympian and US Champion Ice skater Tonya Harding was convicted of organizing an attack on another Olympian Nancy Kerrigan. After the 1994 Olympics concluded, Tonya Harding pled guilty to hindering the prosecution and was subsequently banned for life from the US Figure Skating Association.

The film begins with the statement that it’s based on “irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly” as well as some archival footage. We see Tonya’s bleak childhood in Portland, Oregon, her acid-tongued mother, and the departure of her father. We also see Tonya’s waitress mother LaVona (Allison Janney) taking Tonya to the ice rink to meet coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson). Diane doesn’t accept pupils as young as Tonya, who according to her mother is a ‘soft 4,’ but LaVona doesn’t take no for an answer and tells her child to get out there and skate.

By the time Tonya (Margot Robbie) is in her teens, she’s already a phenomenal talent, and it’s at the ice rink that she meets Jeff (Sebastian Stan) and his plump friend Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser). Basically, it’s all downhill from there–with conflicting statements about Jeff and Tonya’s relationship and marriage which ended in divorce in 1993.

This is where the story gets weird and versions deviate when it comes to just who knew what. Anyone who watches this highly entertaining film will have their own opinion.

I’ve read criticisms of the brilliantly created and well-acted film with such statements that we are supposed to feel sorry for Tonya Harding, and of course, we all ask ourselves how much Tonya Harding knew. Underneath that big question, for this viewer, the film is about being poor and disadvantaged in America, but it’s also about talent and what we do with it. This is a particularly fraught situation when you are talking about athletic talent in a sport in which you peak in your early 20s.

I loved the scenes with Tonya skating to rock music. Personally, I think it was a shame she stopped that and conformed to the classical routines. This is from the film:

And here’s the real Tonya Harding skating with pure joy to 99 Luftballoons:

Bad Banks (German series 2018)

I’m old enough to still have images of the old stodgy banker in my head: the stereotypical banker was a solid, pudgy late-middle-aged man, and yes while he may have had a secret mistress who dressed him in nappies and spanked him, this was a man as boring and as no-nonsense as the sternest headmaster. In other words, the Banker was a respectable, middle class, plodding figure who took no risks with your money.

Fast forward to the 21st century: banks make easy targets when it comes to institutional villainy. This is especially true following the collapse of the housing market and the ‘shocking’ revelations that banks  (and the shadow banking system) engaged in the subprime mortgage fiasco. But with all our disapproval of bank-shenanigans, the wonderfully engaging German TV series Bad Banks reveals unmined territory: the pressure, the dirt, the creative accounting behind the scenes of the Frankfurt based Deutsche Global Invest bank.

Ambitious, yet fragile Jana (Paula Beer) is humiliated and abruptly fired from Crédit International in Luxembourg when she speaks out of ‘place’ while working with arrogant, misogynistic Luc Jacoby (Marc Limpach). But luck seems to drop into Jana’s lap when the older Christelle Leblanc (Désirée Nosbusch) offers to help Jana land a new job with the dynamic Gabriel Fenger (Barry Atsma) the head of Investment banking at the rival bank: Deutsche Global Invest. Jana, talented, yet naive, who leaves her boyfriend and his young daughter behind and subsequently moves to Frankfurt, is thrilled by Leblanc’s female mentoring/apparent act of kindness, yet as the story unfolds it’s clear that Christelle expects to be repaid….

The aggressive, charismatic, intimidating Fenger demands the impossible from his ‘team,’ and consequently, the younger bankers lead stressed out lives even as they compete, manipulate and whore their way to the next lucrative deal. Working with Jana is Thao Hoang (Mai Duong Kieu) a young Asian woman who initially loathes Jana, and Adam (Albrecht Schuch), a seemingly quiet, young family man.

Fenger recognizes that Jana has talent but that talent is only as good as the next deal she lands. There’s also a sexual chemistry between Fenger and Jana, but she’s difficult to read. She’s a cipher–easy to underestimate because she shows weakness. This display, though, can occasionally be played for maximum benefit.

Scenes show just how far these young bankers will go to land a deal, and Jana manages to leapfrog obstacle after obstacle, sometimes with questionable ethics while Thao watches on the sidelines oozing malice. Jana, aware of Thao’s dislike, tries to offer friendship, but Thao initially predictably rejects Jana’s overtures. Jana, taking a page out of Christelle Leblanc’s book,  decides to approach Thao differently:

Women don’t work together or form groups. They also won’t go to brothels together. We’d rather pretend to hate each other, destroying each other.

This is a male-dominated world, men have the power and the money, while prostitutes and strippers are just chess pieces to land deals. That leaves the female bankers with a poor hand of cards unless, like Jana and Christelle, they can be smarter.

Lots of drama here–lots of scenes showing how people are driven by various impulses which, inevitably, veer out of control. This is a dynamic, riveting drama, packed with spectacular photography, and while I didn’t care for the A team feel at the end of episode 6, this paves the way for further malfeasance.

I loved this series for the way it explores our relationship with money:

A simple number is a wonderful thing. It can mean something different for everyone. Wealth. Status. Recognition. Addiction. Adrenaline. Greed. Life. Everyone has their own drive. Their own number that they keep wanting to increase, a number they’re prepared to do anything for. 

The Adulterer (Series 1: 2011)

Since the action in the Dutch series, The Adulterer is sparked by an extramarital affair, it’s easy to see how the series acquired its name. While the title evokes racy images, adultery is just one aspect of this complex crime series. The alternate, much more appropriate title is Betrayal or Overspel. 

Attractive magazine photographer Iris van Erkel-Hoegaarde (Sylvia Hoeks) is married to public prosecutor Pepijn van Erkel (Ramsey Nasr), and they have a young son together. Although both husband and wife have good careers and a lovely home, we know almost immediately that something is wrong in their marriage. Perhaps it’s Iris’s complete inertia during sex, or perhaps it’s her ability to tune out? Whatever it is, Pepijn, who appears to be a milquetoast, seems blissfully unaware that his mis-matched wife is completely disinterested in him.

At a show of Iris’s photographs, she meets married lawyer Willem Steenhouwer (Fedja van Huêt) the son-in-law of the criminal real estate magnate Huub Couwenberg (Kees Prins), and sparks fly.

Willem is married to Couwenberg’s daughter, Elsie (Rifka Lodeizen). Elsie is so busy running her barely-staying afloat restaurant, that she’s also unaware that her family is falling apart. Not only does Willem begin an affair with Iris, but Elsie and Willem’s twin teenagers Marco (Jeffrey Hamilton) and Marit (Sirid ten Napel) begin dealing with crises of their own when Marco brutally attacks one of Marit’s friends.

The various worlds of the inter-connected characters are fascinating. Huub Couwenberg and his brain-damaged son, Bjorn (Guido Pollemans), live together in mal-adjusted domesticity, and while Bjorn leads a privileged, somewhat sheltered life listening to rock music, playing violent video games and visiting the local brothel, he tries hard to please his father, too hard as the series shows. Huub alternates between explosive anger and affection for the son who frustrates him: a child in a man’s body.

Then there’s Elsie and Willem who lead separate lives with discontented teenagers thrown into the mix. Marit wants to talk about the criminal activities of the family and Marco wants to emulate his grandfather.

But arguably the most chilling aspect of family life is seen in the home of Iris and Pepijn van Erkel. He seems so harmless–with an almost Danny Kaye harmless, buffoonishness to him, but look closely. He’s all over Iris at her exhibition, and then lets her know when he’s waiting, in bed, for sex.

Soon adultery is at the heart of a web of deceit, lies and murder, and the characters who were at one point, divided into the good/bad categories become shades of grey as loyalties clash and various agendas emerge.

There are a few false cliff-hanging moments but certainly not enough to mar this well-acted, addictive series.

In Dutch with subtitles