Une affaire Privée

Was pleasantly surprised by this one. Popped up on my Amazon Prime suggestion. I liked the artistic film style, the lighting, the era and the fast paced story line. Character are engaging. Looking forward to seeing more. Took a bit getting used to it being dubbed in English because the audio didn't sync with mouth movement but not a deal breaker. Worth watching more. Jean Reno is always a pleasure to see in movies. Had not heard of the main female actress before but she's is very cute and believable in this role. It reminds me of Murder on the Orient Express style of movie. Will be back for more.

Like so many recent productions and books in which lazy writers set stories in the past, yet forget to do any kind of serious research about expressions that are used, concepts that are common and technology that existed at the time in which the story takes place, this series is rife with late 20th and early 21st century language and attitudes. It takes away from a fun and otherwise well-produced program.

It is very tiresome that too many people who write stories taking place in bygone eras cannot be bothered to do even a modicum of research to make sure they've stayed true to those times. It takes a few minutes to Google the origins of a word or phrase to make sure it was in use at the time. Ditto manners and mores, songs, films, clothing and technology. Are they stupid or just lazy?

The story takes place at the end of the 1940s in Galicia, where a sassy upper-class girl with a taste for mystery, Marina Quiroga, together with her butler Hector, sets out to hunt down the serial killer who has been stalking the city for months. I say it's "cute" because it doesn't seem too serious, even though it's about murder and a serial killer. In the first episode our heroine Marina complains the man her mother would have her marry has a "unibrow." Monobrow first appeared in a novel in the late 1960's and Unibrow in 1981. Frida Kahlo, who died in 1954 is arguably the most famous person with a unibrow on this side of the world, died in 1954. What did they call hers? Her self portraits left it clearly represented. Anyway, I digress. This was enough to make me pause the episode and get more history than I could ever want about the unibrow. So far, it's a great occupant of my downtime. Enjoy!

The dubbing is as good as it could be, but after ten minutes I switched to the original Spanish with subtitles and, suddenly, what had been a bit tiresome became excellent. Also, it seems very likely that many of the language anachronisms were down to the poor translation demanded by the need for the lip-sync to be as smooth as possible. Before you give up on this, do what I did. You'll enjoy it a whole lot more. Though I don't disagree that it could have been tightened up considerably - it was a little slow in places. Now I'm wittering a bit to make up the character count. Never met that before!

I just started watching this series on Prime. A lot of people making reviews here of this show have complained about the English dubbing. Prime has this bad defect in that they seem to be the only streaming service that when living in the USA seams to automatically default to English dubbing of foreign shows. Please be aware that in most cases, you CAN turn it back to the original language and put on English subtitles.

When you use your remote, just tab down on it. You should see the actors in the scene shown. But above that are 3 icons. The middle one if you click on it allows you to select which language the movie has subtitles for. So obviously click English. The icon to the far right is the audio icon. In this show the original audio is Spanish. So select Spanish. Now the movie will show in it's original language and with English subtitles. It is Always better to watch a foreign show in the original language with English subtitles, rather than with bad English dubbing where nothing matches what the lips say they should say.