[tv] Inspector de Luca
Jun. 29th, 2014 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulroYes, it was on in April. I record 3 times what I have time to watch, so it takes a while.
This is a four-part Italian series set in WWII. The first episode was decidedly sub par and didn't exactly inspire watching more, but I'd done series record and in the spirit of continuing to learn European languages via the medium of crime drama I persisted.
I ended up being really glad I did. The second and third episodes were much better. In the second, de Luca is a policeman in Bologna at a date when I thought the Italians had already surrendered but they seem to be still fighting, and Il Duce is definitely still in charge. It's about trying to do effective police work in a climate where everybody is paranoid about the regime and air raids are a daily occurrence. I can't remember much about the mystery itself, but the point was more about the near impossibility of keeping law and order in the circumstances, and about being the poor sod who really cares about continuing to do so.
At the very end of episode two Bologna has fallen to the partisans and de Luca finds out that he's on the "first against the wall" list because even though he's not a fascist, one of the things he did as a police officer was save Mussolini's life, so he has to run away, with the other fascists. In episode three he's on the run with a fake ID, but in a small town the partisan policeman (who has no experience as a policeman but who also cares about law and justice) recognises de Luca and blackmails him into helping him solve the murder of a much-loved local man. de Luca starts out reluctantly but gets drawn into the puzzle. This is easily the best of the four programmes.
The fourth takes place on the eve of the 1948 elections, in which good policing is even more difficult because of the politics. It still making some important points, but it's the one that I found most depressing and I couldn't really get into it.
There was a series called Foreign Bodies on Radio 4 some time ago about how all the different European nations work through their angst over 20th-century events though the medium of detective fiction, and Inspector de Luca was a good example of this.
This is a four-part Italian series set in WWII. The first episode was decidedly sub par and didn't exactly inspire watching more, but I'd done series record and in the spirit of continuing to learn European languages via the medium of crime drama I persisted.
I ended up being really glad I did. The second and third episodes were much better. In the second, de Luca is a policeman in Bologna at a date when I thought the Italians had already surrendered but they seem to be still fighting, and Il Duce is definitely still in charge. It's about trying to do effective police work in a climate where everybody is paranoid about the regime and air raids are a daily occurrence. I can't remember much about the mystery itself, but the point was more about the near impossibility of keeping law and order in the circumstances, and about being the poor sod who really cares about continuing to do so.
At the very end of episode two Bologna has fallen to the partisans and de Luca finds out that he's on the "first against the wall" list because even though he's not a fascist, one of the things he did as a police officer was save Mussolini's life, so he has to run away, with the other fascists. In episode three he's on the run with a fake ID, but in a small town the partisan policeman (who has no experience as a policeman but who also cares about law and justice) recognises de Luca and blackmails him into helping him solve the murder of a much-loved local man. de Luca starts out reluctantly but gets drawn into the puzzle. This is easily the best of the four programmes.
The fourth takes place on the eve of the 1948 elections, in which good policing is even more difficult because of the politics. It still making some important points, but it's the one that I found most depressing and I couldn't really get into it.
There was a series called Foreign Bodies on Radio 4 some time ago about how all the different European nations work through their angst over 20th-century events though the medium of detective fiction, and Inspector de Luca was a good example of this.
