My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Wednesday, April 12, 2017

A lurid tale from Iceland: Is this miniseries exposing a social ill, or exploiting it?

Three episodes into the Icelandic crime series Case (Netflix), and will probably continue despite many reservations. This story centers on a 14-year-old ballet student who hangs herself over the stage in the theater. The Icelandic police conduct an investigation, and all evident signs point to depression, pressure from parents, boyfriend troubles - but the lead investigator thinks there's more to the story and pushes hard to keep the case open. When she hits a wall, a law firm that takes pride in fighting cases of child abuse, takes on the case and brings in as an associate a down-and-out attorney who may be ruthless enough to solve the crime. As the first episodes unfold we see that the dead girl and many of her friends were involved in sexual relations with the leader of a youth group and that he and his brother have been filming videos of the sexual encounters and posting them on the web, perhaps for a profit? OK, so this series "exposes" a serious social problem and criminal enterprise, but we can't help but feel that the series thrives on the very sensationalism and criminal cruelty that it professes to abhor - much like the Dragon Tattoo series. There are many, many plot strands to this story, and as a result the lead investigators - of whom there are at least 3 different agencies (police, the law firm, social services) don't really emerge (yet) as characters. Also, it seems Icelandic police and media practices are very different from this in the U.S.: for ex., the police immediately interrogate the parents of the girl who hanged herself as if they're investigating a crime scene and the parents may even be suspects. And: the media cover the death in a highly lurid manner, one outlet going so far as to writing a page-one story about how these parents pushed their kid too hard to succeed. Maybe that's how it's done in Reykjavik, but I'm guessing that's a socio-cultural inaccuracy on the part of the filmmakers.

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