Desaparecida: O Caso Lucie Blackman

Has everything you'd want in a true crime documentary: a fascinating case, tons of archival footage, linear storytelling, very little (if any) re-enactments, a beautiful score and some stunning photography (Tokyo is a beautiful city). Not to mention interviews with the actual people involved. So many docs these days fail in at least one of these areas so it's nice to see one that does it all right for a change.

Obviously it's a sad case and a terrible situation for her family, so you can't fault her father for wanting answers. And that's another fascinating element to this case is the dynamic between her family (father, generally) and the Japanese police who handle things a bit differently than we're used to in the West.

Overall, one of the best true crime docs I've seen this year. Definitely recommend.

This is a very well done and compelling true crime documentary about the disappearance of a British foreign National in Japan who becomes the linchpin for the investigation into sexual deviance and sexual crime in Japan. The case unveiled a look at how The Japanese police treated sex crimes and crimes against foreigners. The show features archival footage, contemporary interviews, and documents associated with the case. Jake Adelstein, the subject of HOB's Tokyo Vice, is featured as a Western reporter with intimate knowledge of Japan and the Japanese police. The show is good. It is sad, but good. The show has a lot of cultural undertones, and it is tight as far as documentaries go.

The only thing I could personally think of throughout the entire thing was who in their right mind would let their 21 year old daughter go across the world to completely unknown place to work in a hardly legal semi anonymous dark place baiting old men for money, knowingly putting themselves in harm's ways.

The fact that the father never addressed that is baffling. World must had felt a safer place 20 years ago when no parent questioned this. I find this beyond comprehension. The fact that she disappeared less than a month into a job is scary. These are the issues that should had been addressed.

There's been a sort of backlash against true crime sensationalism lately, to the sort of degree where there's been an intentional shift towards a focus on the victims of crime rather than the criminals or police. Though even that has gradually started to see this leading to exploitation.

This documentary goes a very odd route by seemingly avoiding the victim to a large degree. Lucie Blackman's disappearance is the driving force here, but from the very start we are essentially following the police and their investigation. We don't know who Lucie Blackman is, what she was doing before she disappeared, who she knew, anything that a typical documentary would, setting up the person, brief backstory, then their disappearance and then the investigation.

Instead we jump straight into the investigation. At the same time, focus is being given to Lucie's father who apparently has to harangue the police into actually investigating this as a crime.

Even from there there's not much actually going on in terms of a narrative here around Lucie Blackman. We're shown her father railing against the cops and their apparent ineptitude but we never actually see or hear how they are mishandling the case at first.

Once the cops start down the case, leads are picked up on and followed but we aren't very clear in terms of how said leads were picked up on and how they even relate to the Blackman case, possibly in large part because we skipped over the basic facts of the case and started the documentary with her already missing and without ever really looking back into the "who what where why how" of her actual disappearance.

This is a documentary, so it's supposed to be informative first, with the entertainment aspect being a sort of uncomfortable pushed-aside element that is implied but never made obvious.

Because of this, it's hard to review a documentary, since critiquing it for being boring or otherwise not entertaining is kind of missing the point and a lot like critiquing the news for constantly moving on to new topics of reporting and discussion.

As a result, my problem with this documentary isn't with the entertainment but with the information given. Namely, we aren't given a lot of information. As mentioned, they start off 3 days after the disappearance, and don't give us the starting facts that almost every missing persons case starts with. As well, when we're being told about certain things, we aren't actually shown enough information that would support what is being shown.

As an example, at one point we are told about a trial and the results of a trial. However we are not given any information as to why the result of the trial ended up how it went, particularly considering that we went along with the discovery of the key bits of evidence with the police. Why did this happen? Why did it fail? From just this documentary alone, we don't know.

I know this story pretty well already, having read a few books on it. Tokyo Hostess, in particular, was well written and gave a lot of detail.

This documentary starts when Lucie has already disappeared, so there is no background to her life in Tokyo and her job working in the hostess club. It suffers greatly for this, as this is what would make the casual viewer care about her story.

Instead, it's her father, who I find seriously arrogant, who is star of this show. Not playing down that he lost his daughter, and obviously what happened to Lucie was evil, but I just couldn't deal with him throwing his weight around in another country. I know this won't be a popular opinion. Reading that he accepted a cash payment in hopes of a reduced sentence from a friend of the killer makes him look even worse, honestly.

Lucie took a silly risk to make easy money (again, in no way makes what happened to her okay). Father has the air of wealth, so not sure why he didn't just fund her holiday instead of letting her do that. Even a safe country has its issues.