The day before her seventeenth birthday, a girl …
… goes to a music festival …
… and disappears.
We’re back in Forbrydelsen territory here.
There’s Frans Bak, who did the Forbrydelsen score. And this is complete with the goddammed aerial shots:
Right. Just three will do. Stop with that shit already! It’s overused.
Instead of a determined female cop with a shitty life, we have a determined male cop new to his position …
… and his female partner apparently has some sort of issue about food.
To cement the Forbrydelsen connection, episode two opens with the missing girl running in the woods:
Which tells me writers are running out of ideas out there. I can’t believe this is a French Thing, some sort of tongue-in-cheek homage.
Both episodes have a leisurely pace. Nothing to pump up the adrenaline.
I was going to quit after episode one, but the twist ending made me curious.
With episode two, I got the point:
This isn’t just about a girl who’s disappeared. It’s about how lives are constructed and how they fall apart when they have to be examined.
Everyone presents a pack of lies to everyone else …
… and none of that shit will stand up against a police investigation. The police need the absolute truth to move forward.
This shot I found particularly interesting and I have to wonder if the director meant how I interpreted it:
In the big world — and the entire universe — we’re just small things no matter how large our problems are.
What interests me — and will keep me watching — is not the solution to the girl’s disappearance, it’s how damned long everyone tries to keep their lies alive. Because even in episode two, people who should have been telling the truth were covering up. And one of those lies involved the stupid destruction of evidence that could have been helpful in solving the disappearance!
Note to anyone else who wants to enter Forbrydelsen territory: Do it right. What’s going on in Disparue is all linear. There aren’t separate stories that twine together in suspense at the end. In both episodes, we get one surprise at the end. None of the tension of multiple stories playing out in a montage — with Frans Bak’s wonderful montage music, as so:
OST Forbrydelsen (The Killing). Frans Bak.
The official trailer — in French — for Disparue is here. I’m not embedding it because it clearly contains spoilers.
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