New Polish-language crime drama from Netflix. Original title: Kolory zła: Czerwień
A murdered young woman; a new investigator transferred from another city; a local mafia capo – brutal and cruel, with strange erotic preferences; a hard-line boss who only stares at statistics, an unsolved crime from years ago, cops involved in dark dealings…
“… a stone, a leaf, an unfound door1.”
Zofia just did her first nude scene last year, but she already has four in her nudography.
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Footnote # 1: That last bit has nothing to do with the film. It just seemed to fit there. It is the famous opening line of “Look Homeward, Angel.” I have always been ambivalent about Thomas Wolfe, “Asheville’s favorite son.” I love Wolfe’s work so much that I, ever the literary fanboy, once went through a cemetery in Hendersonville, NC just to see the original angel, which marks the grave of a woman named Margaret Bates Johnson. (I felt like Tuco looking for Arch Stanton’s tombstone 2.) I also hate Wolfe’s work so much that I have no hesitation about calling his exposition tedious, prolix and self-indulgent – and that’s even after his brilliant editor tried to strip the bloated bodies of his manuscripts down to muscle and bones. Wolfe wrote many words in his short life; too many. With apologies to Mr. Wolfe across the chasm of time, I don’t care how many centerpieces were on the table, how they differed, or how the caterer was selected from the many available options; and I don’t appreciate salad forks any more when they are described with the kind of grandiloquent rhetorical flourishes that should be reserved for thoughts of truth, beauty or mortality.
But I can’t deny that sumbitch could flat-out write:
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
We can’t turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire — a brain, a heart, a spirit.
Footnote # 2: Even my footnotes have footnotes. That’s a reference to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
I wonder whether Sergio Leone knew that he had made a movie that would some day be celebrated as one of the ten best of all time, or did he think he was churning out just another one of his excellent Spaghetti Westerns?