Il principio del piacere

The director manages to pick beautiful shots and the actors do a great job in this thriller series across Eastern Europe. Alas, the storyline is rather convoluted, with many characters and possible culprits. At times it seems the detectives are as confused as the audience, with little coordination or plan.

I thought that the acting was professional and first rate. It was dark, gloomy, erotic and although thoughtful, it was clever and twisted. More please as must produce another season.

The excellent internationally famous Czech actor Karl Rodens understated performance in itself would entitle this series to an 8 out of 10 rating and had this series been transduced into 8 Episode instead of 10 Episodes it may well have deserved an 8 . With the story unfolding over 3 different countries and switching back and forth from one country to the other , it became ,partly where which Police Service was where but more importantly which CRIMINALS WERE WHERE . The attractive and talented female lead was putting in a faultless if sometimes following a dubious script , performance and things were going great until they removed the subtitles ( on the All4 UK presentation ) and suddenly I had to become a detective in order to discover what she was saying . . She sounded like she had learned AMERICAN English from watching old MAE WEST MOVIES .

This depicts a reality that stunted anglocentrics will find confusing, many of whom forget that most people don't have English as a first language and that most people have "an accent" when they speak our tongue. If nothing else, it's such a relief to hear and see how all those non-anglophones, a majority of the world's population, communicate and solve problems, resorting occasionally to English ("with an accent" -of course and 110% better than my Czech!- ) as a llngua franca. This is part of the reality in the drama. To dub it all or to put it all in one language, or with references to only of the three national cultures involved, with their different histories, different policing issues, etc., might make it more palatable to US-Americans used the cultural babyfood of Hollywood but it would totally deny what the story is all about.

I confess that I was very impressed by this series. Events happen at an accelerated pace, and if the plot is complex, the solutions are always unexpected. Top-notch music, neat photography. One of the best crime series I've ever seen. Ready to watch a second time. The actors are excellent, and convincing to the extreme. A precise image of what the former communist countries have become: a paradise for the mafia, arms trafficking, corruption, prostitution and crimes. A gloomy series as is the reality for many people in Ukraine, Poland and the Czech Republic. Highly recommended