UMBRE
HBO
produced 8 part series
This review is riddled with spoilers.
Umbre translates as 'Shadows' in Romanian.
I’d been drawn to watch Umbre after reading
it’s irresistible marketing pitch – it’s a crime series, in the style of
Breaking Bad.
First impressions were good, getting straight into a scene that was both intriguing and set the tone for the entire series. The palate is dirty yellows and greys.
The opening scene gives us our first sight of our star, and it’s always
good to see actors that are unfamiliar.
A good start from the opening scene, and
then boom – the characters started to speak.
Now, I know there are many conversations
between men that I'll never be privy to, and I may not really understand the
camaraderie between men. But in Umbre, the dialogue strongly suggests that when men
get together, the talk is ripe for misogyny. Ripe? According to Umbre, it’s
rancid.
According to Umbre, they say things
out loud in Romania, that obviously never in 50 years of Australian tv has any
screen writer been game enough to write for our admittedly sanitized tv land.
A steady consumption of Nordic-noir with
increasingly eccentric female lead detectives had obviously lulled me into a
false impression of European gender relations.
In Umbre, references to women are horrible. Beyond horrible. It made the show nearly unwatchable. But the production values, and
damn it, the story, was interesting. I wanted to see what was going to happen. Would one man finally go to far and have his tongue ripped out by a woman who’d just had it
with the foul banter?
The sheer awfulness of the dialogue abates
a little or maybe one becomes numb to it, once the show’s style has been bedded
down. There are some casual references to female sex slaves that are pretty
rank. And then the main character hits his daughter in the face, in one touching scene of
fatherly concern.
Bloody hell.
Amongst all of this there are some genuine
laugh out loud moments, despite my revulsion at the ongoing mistreatment of women.
The lead actor - Serban Pavlu - is a big name in Romanian
theatre. The main character, Relu, is somewhat of a devoted family man, trying
to provide for his family. Here lies the similarity to Walter White, as slim as it is.
A huge bloke, I can’t seem to recall Relu
ever changing expression, and this includes the first episode where he and a
number of other men are hairy backed and full frontal naked.
But he grew on me and it helps that he is taller than most with a
distinctive stiff backed walk, so it was easy to pick him out in every scene. Should I mention that the cast are mostly dark haired and/or olive skinned? Not
really important I suppose, but the difference from the all beige colour chart
of Australian tv is hard not to notice.
The stand out performance that crept up on
me was the old Uncle. He’s the kind of
uncle that lives in the shed down the back, watches a lot of porn and is well
known to the local prostitutes. Not the kind of uncle that I am familiar with,
but he is engaging, if slightly repulsive.
Filmed in 2014, it was HBO’s first foray into producing a tv series in Europe. There’s been no mention that I can see, after
a quick internet scan, of a second series. I’ve wondered why over the past couple of
days after binge-watching the entire series on Friday night.
Granted, there may well be others wondering
what the fuss is about, as they steadily consume porn and don’t blink an eye at
the exploitation of sex slaves and underpaid workers imported from eastern
European countries.
Or maybe the question should be, who isn’t
aware of these practices that are blithely depicted in Umbre? Which country, which city, which sleepy little country town hasn't swept aside concerns about what happens in their parks, their truck stops and their back streets? In polite company, most would decry the dehumanization
of women and children, but honestly what are they doing about it, besides contributing to
the demand for these ‘products’.
Domestic violence is most generally condemned,
but women and children continue to die even in the nicest, most affluent
neighbourhoods of the most advanced countries.
They die a lot more often if they are black in Australia. Though black men
will say on national tv, they can't sit there as a black man and let that kind
of slur go unchallenged. They need to sit there, and listen and learn how their purse mouthed silence, and deflecting of the root causes of death for so many black women in numbers that
increase each year, is a form of collusion.
Is Umbre a comment on that hypocrisy? Is it meant to unsettle European audiences?
Does it mirror the crime and debauchery that the US continues to spread around
the world, with their enchanting sound tracks, their ethereal opening credits
and their cliff hanger endings?
Is Umbre just a little too real?
Is it simply too ugly to capture a large and
devoted audience?
In the end, what I found grated the most was the depiction of Relu’s wife. Perhaps it was too much to hope for that in
such a male-dominated series as Umbre, at least one of the female characters
had some dimensions to her.
Which leaves me with the final thought –
who was the intended audience?
I can’t deny the possibility that it may
appeal to some viewers that the predominantly male cast didn't wax their bodies into
glistening fake tanned perfection, and the killers rarely used guns.
If Umbre is only targeting male viewers, that
brings the makers up well short of the audience a big budget production
requires. If this was the intention (which I somehow doubt) they got what they paid for. It feels
like observing a group of foul mouthed men, as they stumble, maim and
kill their way through a sweaty, grimy and pointless existence.
In regards to the crime and corruption, frankly that’s how I pictured a
country that I really only know about via grainy news stories of the Romanian
Revolution, and many years before, the sublime athleticism of Nadia Comaneci.
Despite one scene shot in what looks very
much like a Bunnings, I had to wonder, if what I saw in Umbre, with its mix of
wealth and poverty: is this the
aftermath of a country recovering from a turbulent past?
Ignoring the dialogue for a moment, it’s
got enough going for it to garner a high rating. But the violence and
marginalization of women was too much for me.
I have a high threshold for violence,
though have been known to fall asleep during Game of Thrones from sheer
boredom. I watched the entire series of Umbre after being drawn in by the
story, after all.
But would I recommend Umbre? I’m not really sure how I’d go about that.
‘Umbre… it’s all kinds of horrible but
there was some comic relief, until the best character dies. But if you can’t handle one more Nordic crime
series, travel to the dark side and give it a whirl.
And if you can't rethink your deflection of the reality of black men being largely responsible for the death of black women, it's exactly your kind of show.’
