Friday, June 16, 2006
Dans le merde
FRENCH! Spiral, BBC4, from 10.30pm
The French have a word for it. That word is "Engrenages". It translates literally into "gears", according to the not-always-reliable translation engine on Altavista, so the English name for it is Spiral. Not even "speee-rrrrrral", rolling the r's in that lovely French way, but regular English "spiral", which is a shame.
Hold on, you shout, why are you babbling on about French? And why are you recommending programmes on BBC4? Have you forgotten what site you're writing for? Well, don't panic, dear readers: we haven't gone all pseudo-intellectual on you (although we do quite like that feeling we get from knowing that we're voluntarily watching something on BBC4 instead of America's Next Top Traffic Accident or similar), we just happened across this programme while we were channel-hopping the other week, and it turned out to be rather good.
The way we've been describing it to our friends is kind of like a French take on CSI, but with lots of complicated French legal wranglings (and given that we barely understand the English legal system, the French one baffles us completely) and lots of French idiosyncrasies. It's been airing on Sunday nights and is pretty difficult to pick up in the middle, which is why we haven't previewed it before, but the lovely people at BBC4 are showing the first three episodes back-to-back tonight for those wishing to catch up.
The plot, in a nutshell: a girl is found murdered with her face completely burnt off (and we're spared absolutely no gruesome detail on that one, so be prepared to hide behind a cushion if you're a tad squeamish) and a bunch of dishy, brooding Gallic types try to investigate it while having the requisite complicated personal lives and smouldering sexual tension with their colleagues. The only downside is that unless you're fluent in French, you'll be entirely dependent on the subtitles to keep up, so make sure you've gone to the loo and got all the necessary food and drink to hand before you start watching. It's worth it though, we promise.
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2 Comments:
I caught an episode of this the othwer day and it is brilliant. The subtitles don't really translate the way they speak to each other that well, though. It's much more brutal than they'd have you believe. But yes, it's amazing.
Well worth keeping an ear on the dialogue as well as reading the subtitles, especially in Ep. 3 when the subtitle reads "Fisting?" but the dialogue clearly says "Feest Fooking?"
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10:30 am
