A few words on nostalgia

“Nostalgia is our capacity to convince ourselves that our past has essentially been happy, and that therefore our choices have been good. Each time we recall a memory and say ‘it was good’, it is in fact our sick brain distilling nostalgia to persuade us that what we’ve lived through hasn’t been in vain, that we haven’t wasted our time. Because wasting your time is wasting your life.”

(translated – with apologies – from L’Affaire Alaska Sanders by Joël Dicker)

Engrenages (Spiral) S01 E03

Episode 3 begins right where we left off: Pierre, the diary, the judge, his office (note to self, I must work on this ‘Engrenages x Cluedo’ boardgame concept). Roban is immediately angry; very angry. But he checks himself and apologises to Pierre, blaming his suspicion on his lack of a life outside work. Remarkably, Pierre has got away with the intrusion. Not the diary, however, as Roban picks that up to take home with him. Laure spots Pierre leaving the courts building and discretely follows him to his meeting at a café with Benoit. Pierre and Benoit despair of ever getting hold of the diary and resolving the latter’s delicate situation, right up to the point at which Pierre mentions that Roban has taken the diary home. Benoit quickly concludes that there’s nothing be that can be done, and resolves to get on with the rest of his life regardless (or similar). He makes his excuses and leaves, subsequently meeting a shady-looking bloke outside a bar – where they are watched by Laure, whose filoche* has continued.

Her surveillance comes to an abrupt halt when she runs over a pedestrian walking across a clearly marked crossing – very true to French life, that. We’ll see more of this unfortunate character through the episode, but for now this means that Benoit’s mysterious friend is able to remain unseen while stealing Elina’s diary through Roban’s open patio doors. The judge returns to his desk, startled to discover the diary is missing. Before checking his flat, he arms himself with a pistol. I find this very out of character with pretty much everything we see from Roban during the whole series, and therefore mildly disturbing.

Laure tells Pierre that she followed him, and questions his relationship with Benoit. Safe to say Pierre is not best pleased about this and tries to puts Laure back in her box. We next see him acknowledging his closeness with Benoit to Roban, and vouching for his friend. While Roban says he’ll give him the benefit of the doubt over not telling him sooner, his assertion that he hopes Pierre isn’t blinded by the friendship shows he’s marked his card on this one. It’s a tense conversation and Madame Merlin, Roban’s assistant, is asked to leave.

From somewhere or other, Laure rustles up a file on the shady-looking bloke outside a bar (from here on I’ll refer to him as Michel, partly because it’s quicker, and partly because it is his name) who Benoit met. He has a record for low level pimping and drug dealing, while his brother has a much more serious record for involvement in the former. Laure’s next job is to alert Roban to the relationship between Pierre and Benoit. He, of course, is one step ahead of her and instructs her to keep him informed of such things before he finds out for himself. So, a telling off from both Pierre and Roban – not a great few hours for Laure. However things take a turn for the better. This is thanks partly to Marianne (Pierre’s estranged wife) having received a very extravagant present from a new partner, which, uncomfortably for Pierre, is a duplicate of one he had brought for her. Before too long, he accepts a lift home in Laure’s car and they wake up the next morning looking like a pair of cats who got the cream. With their relationship on a new footing, he shows some vulnerability and openly asks for her help in the case.

And so returning to the unfortunate bloke mown down on a pedestrian crossing by Laure earlier on… His response to the accident was to pick himself up and run away as fast as he could while swallowing a number of packets. Gilou finally joins Laure and takes the car-crash-victim-come-drug-mule into custody, where we see a cop from another department offering his own way to get the pedestrian to talk.

A more conventional approach sees an x-ray identify the bags of coke, and a frankly stomach-churning episode in the gents toilets to recover the packets. And yet strangely only 2 of the 3 capsules have turned up as evidence. When the drug squad visit again later, thankfully Gilou remembers that the missing capsule ended up in his jeans pocket. The other cops’ mistreatment of the suspect gives Gilou a chance to hide behind a smokescreen of taking the moral high ground on this abuse, but Laure is having none of it and calls him out for his addiction.

Threads start to get entangled when it turns out that Gilou ultimately owes the shady-looking blo- sorry, Michel, for his supply of coke. Michel knows the police are onto him, but has already got the drug squad to leave him alone. He generously offers to write off Gilou’s debt… in return for Gilou giving him the same special treatment. Mais naturellement…

Meanwhile, another case sees the team investigating the discovery of a partly-burned body in a fireplace. Tintin’s stomach is no stronger than during his visit to the morgue, and he quickly leaves the room. The body is that of Monsieur Lessage of Porcelaine Lessage fame (such a reputed brand of crockery that it is Pierre’s in-laws preference). His wife and the kids speak to Tintin after their return from a break in Cabourg (author’s note: a lovely seaside resort, famous for its connection to Marcel Proust, regrettably less so for its wonderful mini golf course featuring an Eiffel Tower). The apparent random break-in and murder begins to break down when the post mortem (conducted by Tintin’s favourite pathologist) identifies that M.Lessage had taken part in a jeu de main (or fist f*cking ,as the subtitles rather directly translate). It turns out Mme.Lessage knew her husband was gay; it also turns out he’d not only set up a porcelain museum in his company factory, but a private room for his own use.

Laure and Tintin track down a certain ‘Kevin’ who they suspect of killing his lover. But analysis of Mme.Lessage’s automatic motorway payment badge data causes her story to unravel: outraged at her husband bringing Kevin back to the family home, she killed him using a golf club she’d just given him as a gift.

The case of the baby killed by the nanny progresses too, with the baby’s grandparents suggest to Roban that the mother couldn’t cope. Roban in turn speculates that with the nanny being “clearly dangerous”, the mother may have wanted rid of her baby. He manages to elicit a formal complaint from the grandparents; Mme.Merlin is not impressed at the judge**. However, there is opportunity in all things – an opportunity for Joséphine, in this instance. 

Despite her own misgivings, Leroy points out the potential for her to make a splash in defending Ghislaine Androux against the grandparents’ complaint, including getting the press on side. This could be just what Joséphine has been waiting for.

*filocher, one of my favourite Engrenages-isms

** I can’t remember when or why she is replaced as assistant by Marianne, but with the benefit of hindsight this current working relationship clearly isn’t destined for success

Engrenages (Spiral) S01 E02

The previous episode’s cliff-hanger results in Pierre and Benoit visiting juge Roban, and, later, Benoit and Roban in a tense one-to-one. Benoit’s knowledge of the Macguffin-esque diary is gnawing away at him, leading to him asking Pierre to ‘borrow’ it to help him out. Pierre can hear the inverted commas as he says it, appropriately enough, given he recently ‘hung a painting’ in the flat with his estranged wife Marianne.

Roban instructs Laure to investigate Benoit. In parallel, Pierre does some investigation of his own – an off-the-record probing of his father-in-law’s business dealings with Benoit. Marianne’s father clearly believes himself to be a man of the world (having left the School of Hard Knocks to graduate from the University of Life, mate) and acknowledges the grey areas between legality and what we might think of as the cost of doing business.

Confronting Benoit about these shady deals, Pierre has the mirror held up to him about his own compromised position (or, as Pierre himself calls it, blackmail) regarding his grace and favours apartment.

Meanwhile, Joséphine and Leroy continue to dance around the specifics of her employment. She agrees to work for him, securing a 30% increase on her rates, before pressing on to discover why he was disbarred. The revelation of his rape conviction* clearly shocks her, but she knows where her priorities lie. She is soon at work on his behalf, Leroy having engineered her presence at the morgue where Elina’s parents, against Laure’s advice, have gone to see the body. In turning the parents away from their trust in the authorities, Joséphine lays out the bleak realities of the police’s priorities around this case, and also their attempts to find Sophia.

Unsurprisingly, Laure’s attempts to dissuade Elina’s parents from seeing her were well-founded. After the viewer gets a first person view of Elina’s journey from the slab, her parents are left inconsolably distraught at the sight of her body. Later, Joséphine successfully persuades Roban, via Pierre, to link the cases. The judge agrees to see the parents.

The episode concludes with Pierre agreeing to, ahem, borrow the diary. Seeing Roban leave the office for the day, he discretely enters via the curiously unlocked** door. Alas – quelle surprise! – Roban has forgotten his keys*** or some such, and returns to find catch Pierre in the act. No, he’s not hanging another painting, get out of the gutter.

There are two other cases for the team to tackle during the episode. One offering a little light relief, the other less so – namely the discovery of a blood bath in a flat, a baby’s dismembered body, and a nearly catatonic nanny. Pierre is swift to pronounce that she “probably has a history”, reinforcing the unremittingly grim view of humanity that most of the characters start off with. If this is what life in the French legal system does to you, I’ll continue to experience it vicariously if that’s alright.

The nanny’s insistence that the baby “was a burden of evil [with] evil inside it… I had to chase it out… it had to be killed” suggests that, actually, Pierre might know what he’s on about. Roban, however, is having no truck with claims of diminished responsibility: he wants accountability instead. Ultimately, Pierre is left to tell the baby’s mother that the system can’t try someone deemed to be insane. The nanny will instead be sent to a hospital. He can’t do anything more.

Time for that light relief, perhaps? A gang of young deaf people are ripping people off with their bogus charity keyrings. Light relief is a relative concept in Engrenages. But this does at least mean we get to see the gang completely unaware of the police raid on their premises despite lots of vigorous and noisy banging on doors. And we also see Laure taking a shine to the sign language interpreter. He, engaged, is wracked with guilt over their tryst. Her, less so.

Yes mate, she is.

And at some point during all this, Gilou keeps his promise to his favourite informant/sex worker to return her bag of coke. Well, what’s left of it, anyway.

*yes, I did incorrectly mention this in Episode 1, but that’s what happens when you watch a couple of episodes back-to-back, make some cursory notes, and then return to them weeks and weeks later

**is this just forgetfulness from Roban (maybe even a VERY early seed of his future mental decline), or a request for suspension of disbelief from the creators?

*** hang on, this early-signs-of-future-decline theory DOES have legs…

Engrenages (Spiral) S01 E01

An underpass littered with industrial detritus. Discarded tyres, skips full of rubbish. And in one skip, a naked body. Welcome to Paris.

We’re quickly introduced to Pierre Clément, the new public prosecutor. And we see him stood astride a pile of rubble, overseeing operations, while Gilou* cracks on with his job at the working level. Pierre offers some observations on what’s taken place – “she was killed because she was beautiful” … “she must have been beautiful”. Laure Berthaud, capitaine de police, likes him.

Cue the titles. A swirling, confused jumble of letters out of which emerges Engrenages.

A marvellously matter-of-fact pathologist carries out the post-mortem into our victim. He delivers a withering verdict on the surgical techniques of the Communist bloc, adding to the mechanical, factory feel of events and treatment of the victim. He sees things very much as Pierre did: “she must have been beautiful; that would explain the ferocity”. The victim’s face has been beaten beyond recognition. Tintin (lieutenant Fromentin), colleague of Gilou and Laure, faints.

We meet Roban, juge d’instruction**. He quickly makes up his mind about the victim too – a “pute de l’est”. After all, he feels, those over here often are; and she has the profile: pretty, blonde, well proportioned.

Back with Gilou, and we see him using his network in an attempt to glean some information on the victim. His sex worker contact can’t shed much light, but she does give him a bag of cocaine. He assures her (and himself) that he’ll return it next time. Meanwhile Tintin finds out about a missing girl, Sophia, reported missing by her sister Elina. Gilou and Laure visit Elina’s flat; their imminent arrival means a break-in attempt is abandoned. Gilou undertakes a stake-out from his car, until boredom strikes and he snorts a line of coke from a Derniers Messagers CD case, meaning he misses the break-in artist leaving the building. Laure discovers the flat has been broken into. “Cleaned, not burgled”. Later, Gilou tries really hard to avoid taking another line of coke in the toilets at work, for a bit at least.

The body is identified as Elina. It turns out that Pierre’s mate Benoit (some sort of well-connected homme d’affaires who is helpfully letting Pierre, following his recent separation, stay rent-free in a very nice apartment) knew Elina. “She was beautiful”, which is good to get confirmed, after all the speculation. Elina’s diary is recovered from a taxi driver’s back seat, and is found to have several names of well known men who were clients of hers.

The episode ends with Elina’s final taxi ride being traced to Benoit’s home address. Pierre is not impressed. “Do I call the police, or smash your face in?”. Decisions, decisions.

Away from this main plotline, we meet a schoolteacher accused by parents of mistreating her pupils through use of a puppet witch (Farandole) and broomstick. The teacher says she is using Farandole only to teach ideas “outside the curriculum”. The parents are clearly furious as they’ve organised a petition to have the teacher removed. You could almost call it a witch-hunt. Although unorthodox (and clearly, to the viewer at least, suffering some form of mental health condition), there is no case to pursue against the teacher. Pierre is suitably scathing of the parents. He tells the teacher the outcome of the case and is keen for her to take action of her own. She is catatonic, and Pierre blames himself for having pushed her too far.

Meanwhile the second sub-plot introduces us to Joséphine Karlsson, a laser-focused lawyer who capitalises upon her legal partner’s untimely death on the job to put herself firmly in the spotlight. She passes off her own closing speech as his, after urging Pierre that they should press on with the case as soon as possible as any delay will “spoil my show”. Marvellous. Winning the case (inevitably), she makes a strong impression on Pierre, as well as a fellow lawyer. This latter introduces Joséphine to Leroy, a debarred lawyer who appears to be something of a mad professor.

He asks Joséphine to take on cases under his guidance and instruction. He’s no longer able to after being convicted of rape – falsely, Leroy says. Visibly shocked, Joséphine soon gains enough composure to negotiate improved terms for herself.

All in all, quite the start. We seem to be in a clinical, industrial, judgemental world. Several moral and ethical boundaries have already been ripped apart, gleefully. Welcome to Engrenages.

*there will be lots to say about Gilou
** ‘investigating magistrate’

Happy New Year!

I’m off to a party in a swanky hotel. A warm welcome awaits, I’m sure.

You did your best, but…

 

After his sojourn in Los Angeles, which produced You Are The Quarry, his first album in seven years, Morrissey buggered off to Italy for a bit, living and recording in Rome.

The resulting album, Ringleader Of The Tormentors, was written with collborators old and new, in Alain Whyte and Jesse Tobias respectively, and roped in some bloke called Ennio Morricone to do a few strings. Tony Visconti, perhaps deciding there was no real future in T. Rex or David Bowie records any more, produced.

Thematically, one thing is particularly noticeable on this album: sex. It’s comfortably the most direct Morrissey has been about matters of the flesh, most notably on Dear God Please Help Me (featuring Morricone’s arrangement) which, inevitably, led to all kinds of conjecture about the exact nature of the relationship described. Similarly, At Last I Am Born, the, um, climax of the album, rounds things off with a crash, a bang, and a throwing-off off life’s worries.

Don’t worry, it’s not all bedroom frolics. Life Is A Pigsty begins with a Well I Wonder-esque drizzly intro, and rises above the sum of its parts to become a spectral, thumping, gripping, but ultimately simple presentation of life as a disappointment. Meanwhile, given the subject matter, The Father Who Must Be Killed is a surprisingly touching song: Morrissey both observes and directs a girl’s actions against her abusive step-father, before she turns the knife on herself, set to a rousing musical backdrop and a children’s choir.

The album highlight is You Have Killed Me, beginning with a growl of guitars and a clash of cymbals and ending with rising strings. Morrissey’s love of his adopted home comes to the fore, with liberal references to both the city (“Piazza Cavore / What’s my life for?”) and the country’s cinematic heritage, singing of himself, his love interest, actors and directors, in a lustrous mix of sexual desires. And the crowd goes wild.

Germinal (Claude Berri, 1993)

Paunchy, but dangerous

I found myself reminded of this Pulp album (which I ALWAYS read as ‘Plup’ no matter how hard I try) from 2001, earlier today, for no apparent reason.

My memory tells me that while this seemed a good album on its release, it didn’t really get much attention or acclaim. The ever-reliable Wikipedia suggests my memory may be about right, as it assures me it reached number 6 in the album charts before disappearing from the charts all together after just 3 weeks. (Of course, I could have made that up, and edited Wikipedia to make it look like my memory was backed up by some other source. I didn’t. But I could have)

Anyway… This album regularly veers between life-affirming optimism (The Birds In Your Garden, Sunrise) and spirit-sapping realities of life (Bob Lind, The Night That Minnie Timperley Died), and a few points in between (I Love Life, Bad Cover Version). Although at odds with a prominent pastoral feel throughout the album, this perhaps captures the mood and atmosphere around the band at the time, culminating in their ‘hiatus’ (in effect an unofficial/unconfirmed splitting-up) soon after this release.

Two personal highlights; firstly the opening two tracks, Weeds and Weeds II (Origin Of The Species), which give us Jarvis Cocker’s take on immigration and the fine British attitude to it, through the metaphor of plant life (“Make believe you’re so turned on by planting trees and shrubs / But you come round to visit us when you fancy booze and drugs”), and an initially rolling, uplifting tune, which becomes spectral in part II (sadly I’ll be damned if I can find any audio of part II online).

Secondly, Wickerman: a meandering, wandering tale which follows a river through Sheffield, taking in such sights as a burnt-down Trebor factory, “courting couples naked on Northern Upholstery”, and drunken Saturday night leaps off a viaduct – a fine example of Cocker’s story-telling, set to a haunting, orchestral-tinged soundtrack…

French twin set

A few days ago, it was the 20th anniversary of the death of Serge Gainsbourg (and if that isn’t an appropriately respectful sentence to remember the passing of a cultural legend, frankly, I don’t know what is. Seriously, I don’t know what is).

Bonnie and Clyde, an album with on/off collaborator Brigitte Bardot, which he describes as songs of love: “amour combat, amour passion, amour physique, amour fiction”, features a remarkable title track. Gainsbourg romanticises the lives of the two protagonists, painting a picture of two lovers defending each other and their own actions (“they claim we kill in cold blood… we simply need to silence those who scream”) in the face of a society which is to blame for ruining the young Clyde and turning him from “un gars honnête, loyale et droit” (‘an honest, loyal, straight-up kid’) into a callous killer. This is set against rich, hypnotic music, in keeping with the compelling, self-assured nature of the lyrics; a special mention has to go to the bizarre, distracting, but somehow integral, background whooping. Needless to say, the pair of them pull this off while looking impossibly stylish.

Gainsbourg knows full well what he’s up to, and tells us as much in his introduction to the song (itself based on a poem reported to have been written by Bonnie Parker). I especially like the knowing, accusatory nod of “ça vous a plu, hein?”, directed at the same society which (of course) both caused and condemned Barrow’s actions…

Vous avez lu l’histoire de Jesse James (You’ve read the story of Jesse James)
Comment il vécut, comment il est mort (How he lived, how he died)
Ça vous a plu, hein? (You liked it, didn’t you?)
Vous en demandez encore (You asked for more)
Et bien, ecoutez l’histoire (Well, listen to the story)
De Bonnie and Clyde (Of Bonnie and Clyde)

A short pause for a brief public service announcement

Just a quick interlude in the ever-riveting series on cricket grounds, but this really is worth pursuing. My friend and blog rival Ray Wittering has made March his ‘Giallo Month’. If, like me, you had no idea what this was on first hearing of it, his own definition should help:

“Giallo films are Italian crime thrillers made between the mid sixties and the late seventies, although the peak period was was probably 1970-1974. A good giallo will feature:

• a convoluted plot that moves fast enough that you don’t have time to realise none of it makes any sense;
• a series of brutal, sometimes ingenious murders perpetrated by a seemingly unstoppable killer (sometimes masked, always gloved);
• stylish production, camera work, fashions and other mod cons;
• the most beautiful women in Europe, often in sexual situations; 
• incredible music, composed by a genius (Morricone, Piccioni, Umiliani, Cipriani, etc.). “

This really, really is marvellous stuff. You might want to check out the earliest posts in the month for some background, and do be aware that “giallo isn’t for kids. The clips and stills to be featured will contain nudity and sadistic violence so, if you are bothered by that sort of thing then you will almost certainly be offended by some of the upcoming content”.