Disparue

This eight-part French remake of an earlier Spanish TV series became the latest sub-titled fix of my wife and I. After a succession of Nordic Noir programmes, this Lyons-set mystery thriller made for an effective change of pace and kept us gripped until the end. Centring around the disappearance of an apparently captivating 17 year old girl after she attends an outdoor pop concert on her birthday, what follows is part police-procedural, part whodunnit and part examination of the effects of grief and loss on individual family and friends connected to the girl.

Unsurprisingly, over eight one-hour episodes, other murders follow, but there is thankfully no serial-killer excess, with a plausible explanation for the subsequent deaths and a reasonable twist at the end, where my previously smug and apparently accurate selection of the killer was controverted, at least somewhat, by the concluding events.

Unlike the familiar Swedish - Danish shows of late, the style here is less dark and oppressive. There is an identifiable French take on events, from much of the action centring on the family restaurant to the seemingly national trait of infidelity with almost every adult character having affairs outside of their established relationships.

The main focus is on the pressures which overtake the marriage of the mother and father of the deceased Lea, the husband who becomes obsessed with finding the killer, harassing the pursuing detective team and setting up his own incident room in his cellar while his wife bottles up her emotions as she tries to keep her family together and marriage intact.

My only gripes would be that I found it hard to accept that a young girl like Lea could beguile so many men, both young and old, as she apparently does, plus I'm not certain the police would actually tolerate the seemingly ever-present attention of the crazed husband-father. Nevertheless, unshowily but effectively directed and excellently acted by almost every cast member, this was an intensely good production from start to finish.

From 'Twin Peaks' to 'The Killing', we're all familiar with the basic template of 'The Disappearance': an attractive but apparently ordinary teenage girl suffers a grim fate, and the detectives have to understand her dark secrets to figure this out. Cue lots of grieving relatives, red herrings and nasty surprises in an extended format. Some series of this sort are even rather good, but 'The Disapperance' will not be joining my list of favourites. Somehow the characters just don't come individually to life, perhaps in part because everyone is beautiful. And a lot of the plot seems to hang upon the girl's father conducting a shadow of the police investigation in a way I found scarcely credible. Finally, the red herrings are all ultimately revealed to be just that, completely unrelated to the crux of the story. Perhaps the problem is simply that the story isn't sufficient interesting to sustain eight episodes. 'The Killing' had a political dimension whereas 'Twin Peaks' soon went off in its own, original direction. Without any novelty, 'The Disappearance', while nicely put together, lacks any elements to lift it above its genre.

Another drama where you have the grieving making accusations at the police, because they think they're not doing their jobs correctly. Blame Blame. Oh and wait 'loud outbursts'.

While I thought it was over the top it still drew me in. I knew who the killer was in the 1st 30 minutes. What kept me watching was they were to be caught, with the twists and turns.

This 8-part French TV series is called in the original DISPARUE ('disappeared'), and is available with English subtitles on DVD. It is truly amazing, and you cannot stop watching it. You simply have to sit through every episode continuously, always on the edge of your seat. It deals ostensibly with the disappearance of a young French girl on her 17th birthday at a late-night pop concert in a park. But the series is really far more complicated than that. The story is set in the French provincial city of Lyon. Has the girl been kidnapped, or murdered, or has she merely run off? A very dour French detective (played in a restrained and sombre fashion by Francois -Xavier Demaison) sets about the complex task of investigating the disappearance. But unlike most series of this kind, the detective is not the main character. The main ones are the girl's family, and even more extraordinary, one of them is a ten year-old girl who is the younger sister of the girl who has disappeared. This amusing little girl is played by a child actress named Stella Trotonda, and she really is a main character, not just a supporting actress. She provides the light relief for a very tense story. The script was written in such a way as to give her many of the best lines of dialogue, many of them hilarious. Who on earth would direct a TV mystery series with a child as a main character? Well, the answer is that the director must be a woman, and she is. Her name is Charlotte Brandstrom. 'Born in France but raised in Sweden', this tri-hybrid can direct films in English, French, or Swedish, being fully trilingual, and speaking also some other languages. Her direction is inspired, but never intrusive. She must have an incredible capacity for rapport with actors, because I have rarely seen such harrowingly intense performances in a series stretching over so many hours, and that must owe a lot to her. One does not know which to praise more, Alix Poisson who plays the mother, or Pierre-Francois Martin-Laval, who plays the father. They are both so brilliant than they are way up in the stratosphere of performers. The range of emotions they are required to portray in the course of the unfolding drama is immense, and by the time the 8 episodes are over, I would say they have deserved several Oscars each. We do see the disappeared girl a lot in the first episode, before she disappears. She is marvellously well played by a very beautiful creature named Camille Razat, who before this had only appeared in one 19-minute film. She is quite a discovery, and portrays a girl so irresistibly charming that everyone's grief at her disappearance is thoroughly convincing. Having someone like her around, who would ever want to lose her? Her first cousin Chris, played by Zoe Marchal, conveys a marvellous air of despondency and mystery throughout, and also does a superb job. Every actor in the series is good, and what with an inspired director and a fantastic original script written by a pair of women (Marie Deshaires and Catherine Touzet), this series is simply sensational. There are so many dizzying twists and turns that one is agasp at it all. The series is a profound study of the inconsistencies, untrustworthiness, mendacity, vacillation, duplicity, and unreliability of an extended family and those connected to them. During the series we discover that everyone is lying about something, everyone is concealing something, and the ground is not solid beneath anyone's feet. This is an exercise in humanology, the science of humans, those strange creatures who cannot be trusted. So much treachery, so many lies, and yet when one first meets them, they all seem so normal, friendly and well-meaning. At one point the mother says, in a moment of reflection on her evident maternal failures: 'I know I did something wrong. I just don't know what it was.' And that is all part of the tragedy: the characters are so flawed but seem unaware of how. The study of all these people close up, warts and all, is absolutely spellbinding. And the mystery goes on and on, a new surprise every few minutes for eight hours. How sad, how strange, how human. And what a brilliant series!

LA DISPARUE contains a fair share of clichés associated with the detective drama. Shot in the east central city of Lyons, it depicts the urban landscape as threatening, with streets peopled with citizens largely indifferent to one another, and a nightlife full of potential criminals - drug-dealers, pimps and predators looking for available partners. By day the city has its beauty-spots such as a local park; but by night they become sinister places for murders and other crimes to take place.

Other clichés include a chief investigating officer Morel (Pierre-François Martin-Laval) who is divorced and has to shoulder the responsibility of a looking after a rebellious teenage daughter Rose (Myra Tyliann). Neither he nor his ex-wife know quite what to do with her.

Nonetheless Charlotte Brändström's production does have its redeeming factors, most notably its portrayal of an apparently happy family torn apart by the disappearance and eventual death of middle daughter Léa (Camille Razat). We discover a tangled web of intrigue; of rivalries, political affiliations; sibling struggles; and the vain attempt of Léa's parents (Pierre-François Martin-Laval, Alix Poisson) to maintain a normal life in the face of almost unendurable pressures.

The chief attraction of the story lies in the rivalry between Morel and Léa's father Julien. While Julien is almost obsessively concerned to find out what happened to Léa, even resorting to illegal behavior in his quest, Morel has to balance an obvious concern for the family with professional ethics. For the most part Morel manages the task successfully, although he admits on one occasion to sidekick Camille (Alice Pol) that he has been severely emotionally affected by the investigation.

The plot is engagingly complex, with each episode ending on a cliff-hanger, culminating in the final episode that contains an unexpected plot-twist. LA DİSPARUE is definitely worth a look.