Stranger - or Forest of Secrets

Last night we finished watching the 16-part series, Stranger, also known as Forest of Secrets. It's available on Netflix; apparently that company paid its producers $200,000 per episode. It appeared on Korean television in June and July of this year, so it's very new. 

Is it worth that kind of money? I'd say it is. Made in South Korea with an all-Korean cast, it's a top-notch thriller-cum-detective story. The two leads, Jo Seung-woo as the Prosecutor, Hwang Shi-mok, and Bae Doona as the female detective, Han Yeo-ji. 

Hwang is one of the few honest Prosecutors in his department, and thus a threat to those who allowed bribery and corruption to creep into their work. But he has had brain surgery when younger because certain things, such as loud noises, affected his emotional state. Unfortunately, the operation has reduced his capacity for empathy and emotion. Jo Seung-woo has to play a man mostly incapable of smiling or expressing happiness or anger. In spite of this the actor comes across as a man with whom we have great sympathy, and some characters in the story admire him greatly. 

Korean prosecutors involve themselves in judicial procedure by conducting investigations, determining indictable cases, and the prosecution process, a mode of operating that's different to the English adversarial system. Thus in this story the Police and the Prosecutors work hand-in-hand for the most part, while still complaining about each other's methods at times. 

Bae Doona is a wonderful actress, and a great foil for the seemingly straightfaced prosecutor. She's gutsy, generous, sympathetic, warm, sharp, cool...everything you want in a heroine. She comes across to the audience as someone you want to keep spending screen time with. A delight. 

There's a massive cast of characters, and to give even a brief indication of the plot would take several paragraphs. Suffice to say a man involved in offering bribes on a large scale is murdered early in the piece, and this leads to an ongoing investigation that gradually sees men of high status brought down. Slowly. 

When I say slowly I mean that the events play themselves out in such a way that we're fooled by red herrings; confused about who's on the right side and who's not - at times; discovering characters who appear to be playing the wrong game but who turn out to be playing the right one, and vice versa. I don't think you'll guess who the actual murderer is before he's revealed (there are three murders scattered over the story), even though you'll know who the real baddies are in the story quite early on. 

The series isn't concerned with a constant rush: many scenes take plenty of time, and reveal character in detail. There are certainly action scenes, and big crowd scenes (a chase through one of Seoul's airports late in the series, for instance), but there's plenty of quiet space as well. 

The series is subtitled, and this is well done, but it takes a bit of getting used to the names. You have to latch onto at least one of the three names virtually every character has and hold it in your head. This isn't always easy, because there are least a half dozen Kims in the story. Kim is a surname, of course - and a very common surname in Korea - but when the characters refer to each other, they tend to put the surname first. So hang onto the first names, if you can!

The music is great, especially the main theme, and the photography outstanding. Even though it's in colour, you come away with a sense of monochrome. We've been gripped by it, even watching two episodes in an evening on some occasions. 

In addition (25th Aug, 2017): Forgot to mention the constant bowing towards superiors that goes on during this series. I'm sure it's a common factor of Korean life. It shows up a politeness that doesn't exist in European countries or the USA. 
And one other thing: cellphones are ubiquitous in every episode. And they always work and no one ever runs out of data and they always get the person they want (with one or two exceptions). They can even track people at the drop of a hat. But in one delightful moment, the hero is forced to go to a computer (shock, horror!) to view a video that's been sent to him. Which kind of puts cellphones in their place...

Video splurge

Had a bit of a video splurge yesterday. Didn't start out that way, but circumstances just brought it about. I decided to see what Hitchcock films were available on You Tube, and found Notorious, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. It's one of Hitchcock's less action-packed films, relying on the subtle interplay of character, and has only one really big scene: a party hosted by Claude Rains, a Nazi-sympathizer living in Brazil after the war. The characters are vividly drawn, and the dialogue full of sub-text: the love story that underpins the suspense is the main focus of the movie in many ways. I've seen it a couple of times before, but had forgotten some of the story. It stands up well after fifty-plus years.

After tea my wife and I carried on watching the Australian legal series, Janet King, which is apparently a spin-off from some other earlier series about a legal firm. We're up to about episode five or six, and I think I haven't seen a series that's so full of improbable legal stuff in a long time. Because the Attorney General seems to be able to command that people do what they're told, for her own political reasons, the Department of Public Prosecutions (where most of the story is focused) jump and go through ridiculous hoops trying to prove cases that are unprovable. Added to that is the detective and his boss who seem to think that building a murder case on the most flimsy of circumstantial evidence is good police work, and you have a series that while it's full of solid characters requires them to do absurd things. The police seem not too fazed about producing witnesses who tell lies; the legal team seem careless about ethics, and so on. If it wasn't actually interesting, it would have been dumped by now. The main character is a lesbian, living with another woman and their twin children, who are toddlers. The lesbian angle seems to be just that: another hook to throw odd bits of storyline onto.

In spite of all this we actually watched two episodes last night, which goes to show how something that's well done can get away with plot-hole murder.

Puccini

Finally, after having written in one of my other blogs about a production of Puccini's opera, Gianni Schicchi, that I was involved in when I was at the Opera Centre in London in 1969, I decided to see if that was on You Tube too. It is, in at least three versions, and thankfully I picked the best-directed one to watch. The other two were okay (I checked out a minute or two of each) but the 2004 Paris version directed by Laurent Pelly, containing a very mixed European cast, was the one that I stuck with.

The opera, which runs for just on an hour, is a total ensemble piece, with a cast of fifteen or sixteen, nine of whom are on stage the entire time. There's no chorus, just larger and smaller roles (one lasting about two minutes). It's a piece of nonsense about a man, Buoso, who's died and left a very unsatisfactory will - that is, he hasn't left anything of substance to his relatives. They plot to bring in the cunning neighbour, Schicchi, and he, being even more cunning than they've thought, winds up replacing the original will with his own version, in which the bulk of the proceeds go to him.

The cast played the thing in a style verging on the comic grotesque, and there were even some surreal moments (a kind of ballet involving the moving around of the bed which features prominently). It's a lot of fun, and requires the main singers to do a huge amount of work. Those who are on stage all the time have to keep up particular characters constantly: there's no let up. Very enjoyable, even if it was sung in the original Italian with French subtitles....some of which I understood and some of which I probably misunderstood.

The Death of Dalziel

I only really discovered the writer Reginald Hill last year, after reading Exit Lines, one of the Dalziel and Pascoe series of crime novels. I had read a book of short stories, some of which were a little odd, some brilliant, and of course I'd seen some episodes of the TV series on DVD. So I was familiar with Hill, in a sense.

Not every Dalziel and Pascoe book is created equally. I tried two others last year and couldn't get into either of them. Hill likes to vary his style quite a bit, and one of these started out as a Grand Guignol piece that didn't suit my taste at all. The other began with two or three men being killed before the first couple of pages were out, and again that didn't seem like Hill's best work, but I could have been just not in the mood.

Anyway, while we were in Christchurch we came across a secondhand copy of The Death of Dalziel, a story, as you might guess, that was written late in Hill's career. No point killing off one of your main characters if you're planning on more episodes. This book is vintage Hill: the wit, the literary quotes, the scatological humour that just avoids the gross and no more, the superb pace, the beautifully-drawn characters - from the well-known duo, to those who feature regularly, to those who were new altogether.

The book has a wonderfully convoluted plot, and shows that Hill as a master of his craft in every respect. Early in the piece, Dalziel and Pascoe are checking out a set of terrace houses that are on their last legs, and in which PC Hector (the world's dullest policeman, who also featured in Exit Lines) thinks he's seen someone threatening someone else with a pistol. Just as Dalziel decides to explore the situation, the place explodes, setting fire to all the terrace houses, and almost killing Dalziel in the process. At this point Dalziel retires from action in the book, and is only seen, as it were, inside his head - he's in a coma for most of the story. Pascoe is forced to take over in his place after recovering from his own injuries, and then finds himself in the middle of all sorts of shenanigans with Muslims, ex-SAS soldiers, the secret force that's supposed to be dealing with terrorism, Knights Templar, a TV chat show that goes wrong, assassinations and more. 400 pages and not one that's inessential.

Young Montalbano

We began watching the crime series, The Young Montalbano tonight. I've mentioned the original series, Inspector Montalbano on a couple of occasions recently, and how we've enjoyed it. The Young Montalbano has a different cast, of course, though some of the characters from the others series gradually make their way into this one, a decade or so younger than before. Montalbano has plenty of hair at this point; his older persona is close to bald. Michele Riondino in no way plays under the shadow of his future self; he's as confident in his role as Luca Zingaretti is in his.

It's a little weird trying to match up a different set of actors in your head, but you find you quickly become attached to these ones too, because the series has been as well cast as the original, and the opening episode had plenty of verve and energy, along with the typical sharpness of mind that characterizes Montalbano; the delight in seafood; the craziness of Catarella (younger, but no less dense and no less frenetic); the bending of the rules to make sure justice prevails, and those wonderful old Italian faces that seem as true to their situation as if they were brought in off the street to play themselves.

Italian crime series

Back in December we started watching a series on DVD called Inspector Montalbano. I think we've managed to get through all that available now, and have a different set on hand called The Young Montalbano, which we haven't started yet, because we're still finishing off Fog and Crimes. More about that in a minute.

The Montalbano series was always worth watching, with intriguing characters - there are some marvellous well-aged Italian faces amongst the casts - and stories that kept your interest up throughout, even though there were often little by-paths that only minimally connected to the overall picture. Montalbano is a man of considerable integrity, amongst other things, but there's one curious element to his character which bothers me. He and his longstanding girlfriend, Livia, who live in separate cities most of the time, have an on-off relationship that never seems to quite come together enough for them to actually marry each other (and we're talking about a couple who are in their early forties when the series started).  Occasionally Montalbano has wound up with another woman in an episode, (wound up in the sense of being intimately involved) and while you can kind of understand that his true love is far away, it does seem to undercut the integrity of the character as otherwise seen. This is emphasized more because on a number of occasions, when one of the less savory characters in the stories is boasting of his/her love life and various women/men, Montalbano and his offsider, Fazio, frequently exchange glances of disapproval, and Fazio (whose home life is never mentioned) in particular seems to have a high moral sexual code.

When we started watching Montalbano we had also been watching Judge John Deed, a British series in which a maverick Judge deals to the law as he sees fit, much to the irritation of the other Judges. This series isn't a patch on Montalbano, but again there's this curious contrast between integrity on one hand and lack of it on another. Deed seldom makes it through an episode without having some sort of an affair with one woman or another, to the annoyance of the woman who is the regular in the cast. These women include his ex-wife.

Which brings us to Fogs and Crime (Nebbie e delitti), another Italian series. This also has a police inspector, Soneri, who's in his forties, and has a live-in girlfriend whom he can't quite make up his mind to marry. In the most recent episode, Soneri was sorely tempted to have a little affair with a young girl he met in the course of his investigations. Wisely he opted out, and turned around to make some repairs to his normal relationship. Let's hope he retains his integrity in this sphere, which will make him a better man than Montalbano or Deed.

Natasha Stefanenko,
the co-star of Fogs and Crimes

Montalbano is set in a fictitious town in Sicily, where the sun never stops blazing and where everything is light. It's so hot you seldom see anyone on the street - we're always wondering where all the extras are. There's an element of sophistication too, to Montalbano's lifestyle, and lots of eating of seafood. Fogs and Crimes is set in the real town of Ferrara, in the north of Italy, and lives up to its series title: there is an almost continual fog, heaps of rain and a dreariness about the place, the people, and the settings. Soneri spends a good deal of time in his favourite ristorante too. Ferrara is a World Heritage Site, and certainly the buildings are lovely, but you wouldn't want to live there if the weather is anything like the series presents. I imagine it's not, and probably the citizens of Ferrara get fed up of seeing their counterparts scurrying out of the rain or barely being able to see through the fog.

Though the two series have many similarities in characters: the helpful offsider; the bumptious lieutenant character who's good at his job but knows it; the annoying Chief of Police, always wanting things wound up; the wonderful blonde leading lady (a part Russian in Fogs and Crimes); the innumerable transients: Tunisians, Poles, Russians and so on.  But there are enough broad differences to make both series well worth engaging in.

Inspector Montalbano

We've been watching the first episodes of the outstanding Italian TV series, Inspector Montalbano. When I say 'episodes' I'm actually referring to full-length TV movies; the episodes run to about 100 plus minutes each.

They're set in Sicily in the fictitious town of Vigata, and feature the blunt and muscular character of Montalbano, a man who admits that he's better at being in charge than deputizing, and who, in spite of his gruff exterior, has a solid emotional core. He runs his troop of underlings with an iron fist, although his lieutenant, Fazio (Peppino Mazzotta), knows that much of his behaviour is bluff. On the other hand, he's quick to complement those who do well - though the complement may be somewhat backhanded.  He has little time for superiors who don't do their job well, and is more likely to insult them as kowtow to them. He can interview a suspect to the point where the person finally gives way and reveals that they truly are the murderer, something Montalbano will have known all along. And he's not above bending the official rules in order to allow someone to go free who shouldn't get into further strife, or to investigate a person's apartment while the person is actually there (or even when they're not there!).

Luca Zingaretti was born to play the role it seems, and certainly he's spent a good few years at the sharp-witted detective, from 1999 to 2013, in some 26 stories. His longsuffering girlfriend, Livia, is played by Katharina Böhm, an Austrian actress. Though Böhm appears to speak the lines, she's in fact voiced by an Italian actress, Claudia Catani. They're supported by a marvellous cast of regulars and one-episode actors, and the production values are superb, the photography in particular.

We've got a 3-DVD set out of the library of the first episodes. I don't know whether there are more available but we'd be happy to watch them if there are, English (sometimes odd) subtitles and all. Subtitles mean you have to concentrate more than usual - especially at those times when the Italians are explaining at an express train speed, and the subtitles are barely keeping up with them.

Gripping and gritty movies

Taking a punt on movie choices can mean that often you wind up seeing something that's a bit of a dud. I usually prefer to have some idea about a movie before I watch it, even if it only costs me a couple of dollars from the Public Library.  However, last week I picked up three movies (we haven't watched the third) and the first two turned out to be crackers. 

One was Nothing but the Truth, which apparently didn't get much of a theatrical distribution for reasons that are beyond my understanding, in spite of having a top-notch cast: Kate Beckingsale, Alan Alda, Matt Dillon, Noah Wylie, Angela Bassett and Vera Farmiga, an actress who plays her roles with such intensity that the television screen threatens to go on fire. The film is based on a true-life case about a political reporter who refused to reveal the source of her story, and wound up in gaol for months.  However, the scriptwriter and director, Rod Lurie, has rewritten the thing from the ground up, changing all the details and the background, so that the film is presented as a proper drama, not as a piece trying to fit around a real-life episode.  It's all the stronger for this, and allows Lurie to write excellent roles for his cast, none of whom let him down.

Beckingsale's character is given the chance to write a piece for her major newspaper that will expose a female CIA agent, but refuses to name her source. This refusal gets her into deep trouble with the Government, and she is thrown into jail by a heavy-handed judge (the actor, in real life, was an attorney in the original case). This causes havoc to the CIA agent and her family, to the reporter's own family and doesn't, in the end, let her off the hook.  It's a tough film made tougher by the insistence on principles that the reporter clings to, and which she finally brings her lawyer around to. You may guess the surprise ending - my wife did, but I didn't; it neatly rounds the film off. 

The other film was originally played over four nights on British television. It's called Father & Son, and stars Dougray Scott, Sophie Okonedo, Ian Hart and Stephen Rea. It's a gripping piece that doesn't turn out the way you might expect; it's violent and dark, but it's about integrity and the idea that eventually the choices you make in life have to be for the sake of others or else you die from the inside out.

The story concerns a career criminal, Michael O'Connor, who wants to put all his bad behaviour behind him.  Unfortunately things aren't as easy as that, and he's forced to decide whether he will amend things he's done wrong properly, or only partially.  His teenage son, Sean, (Reece Noi), the child of a mixed marriage, is accused of a gang retaliation murder, though we know from the beginning that he's innocent. O'Connor hasn't seen his son in a while after his wife was murdered about five years back and there's considerable bitterness in the boy.  But behind the bitterness, we eventually learn, there's a great deal more going on than we first suspect, and part of the story is about the reconciliation required between O'Connor and his son, a reconciliation that needs to take place before things can be healed. There are father and son connections throughout the story, none of them very satisfactory at the start, and a host of brilliantly drawn and played characters.  Part of the story is also the truth about the murder that took place some years before, and how it fits into all the other elements.

Scott plays a tough man who seems at first to have matured; but we learn that his seeming vulnerability towards his new wife and unborn child is only skin-deep.  It takes far more to bring his true self to the surface. He's surrounded by duplicitous characters - the links between different people turns out to be nastier than we expect - and it takes a good deal of sorting out.  The writer was Frank Deasy - he died about the same time the series aired.  He had written the last episode in the Prime Suspect series, and the same grittiness is apparent here.

Exit Music

While we were touring around over the last couple of weeks, I dropped into a few secondhand bookshops (and one or two new book shops, as well).  In Picton, if I remember correctly, I found a very good secondhand bookshop and a proprietor happy to talk at length if I'd so desired.  He had a copy of Ian Rankin's Exit Music, originally intended to the the last in the Rebus series.  We had this on CD, but I'd never listened to it, so I got the trade paperback he had in stock.

Having just read the most recent Rebus book, Standing in Another Man's Grave, in which Rebus, although officially retired, is in no way devoid of his usual energy and insight, it was a bit odd to go back a step and see him preparing for imminent retirement.  Like the latest book, hinges on a huge red herring, though in saying that, the red herring here is actually a vital part of how the book works itself out, rather more so than in the most recent story.

In the first chapter the body of a Russian poet is found on the street in Edinburgh, and everyone who appears in the story - and I mean everyone - is in some way involved with this man, from politicians to small time crooks, from drug addicts to pushers, from academics to bankers.  Not a soul is outside the ever-widening circle of people who are affected.  It's so well written it would easily have made a fitting climax to the Rebus series, and Rebus himself is in fine form - ageing  but not old; sarcastic but witty, anti-authoritarian yet endeavouring to train the younger police officers to respect the right channels.  He knows from his own career how difficult it is to go against the flow.

There's a lot of warmth in this book; more than in some of the Rebus stories.  There's minimal violence - apart from the murder(s) obviously - though the arch villain Big Ger Cafferty comes a bit of a cropper, much to Rebus' annoyance (!)  It's the sort of cropper that could see Cafferty die before he pays his dues.  Rebus would much prefer that he's put behind bars legitimately.

Perhaps, having read the two most recent Rebus titles back to front, I should continue in the same vein, and read through the series again, in reverse!

Stats of a different kind

In his book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín has a chapter on the writer, James Baldwin. On page 314, in relation to Baldwin's concerns about the experiences of black people in America, and the ongoing racial blindness between white and black, he notes the following statistics (which are a little date, but have doubtless worsened rather than improved):


At the end of 2005, there were close 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state or local jails in the United States.  Three thousand one hundred and forty-five black men out of every 100,000 lived as sentenced prisoners, compared to 471 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males; this compares to an estimated 3,000 out of every 100,000 members of the population of Russia who were in jail during Stalin's reign. 


As of 2006, seven million people in the United States were behind bars, on probation or on parole.  The United States has 5 per cent of the world's population and 25 per cent of its prisoners.  737 per 100,000 compared to 100 n Australia and 50 in Norway and 37 in Japan and 29 in Iceland and India. England and Wales, with roughly the same crime rate as the United States, have 149 per 100,000 in prison.  


A report from the Justice Department estimated that 12 per cent of American black men in their twenties and early thirties are in jail now, compared to 1.6 per cent of white males of the same age group.  The general prison numbers in the United States have double since 1990. 


Incidentally, Tóibín's book is primarily about writers and their families, not about crime and black people.  

The David Bain case is not finished yet

It's hard to avoid reading about David Bain in the news. And to add to all the comments, here's a bit more.

There are two things that strike me as odd about the case. Firstly, the motive. While David's father might have had a motive, why would he have killed all his family apart from David? Surely there was no reason to kill his younger son, Stephen, nor his older daughter, Aroha, if his concerns were about his relationship with his other daughter, Laniet. To go round destroying all the family seems an insanity.

Even more unlikely is any motive in David's case. Here was a mild, quiet young man, a bit immature perhaps, but certainly not one who appeared to be greatly troubled by his dysfunctional family, if his behaviour in the world outside was anything to go by. Unlike other mass murderers, there was no hint of withdrawal from society, or underlying anger, or hatred of the world. Compare David to the young man who killed the students in Kansas. The two personalities are light years apart. And look at Bain when he came out of prison. Here was a man full of light and life. Certainly his pleasure at being released was huge, but wouldn't you think there'd be something else, a certain something you couldn't put your finger on? No sign of it. David Bain is either a very good actor, or he's innocent.

The other strange thing about this case is the fact that the police acquiesced in the burning down of the Bain house. This was done within a month of the murders. Apparently this was at the instigation of the Bain relatives. Doesn't this strike you as odd? There are two reasons why it's odd. Why would the police allow a major crime scene to be destroyed so early in the piece, and how come the family had the power to persuade them to do it? Note that the family have once again had a strong say in what should happen to David: he's not to be allowed to stay in the South Island. Says who?

It's crazy, but I have a suspicion there's someone else out there who knows a whole lot more about these murders. Someone who has sat in hiding for all these years, and has the guilt of five deaths on his or her head. Someone who doesn't appear to have a motive because there's never been enough investigation for motive beyond the father and the son. That might make some sense of the puzzle.