If you want to do good crime fiction, you have to work at it. A lot of Prima shows are endless and they shoot terribly fast. The other alternative is series where they do a couple of episodes a year.
These include Sherlock and Maigret. Both are from the UK, which takes a lot of care with its output. Maybe some shows there have hundreds of episodes in a year, but the quality ones have very few episodes in a year.
Maigret has only had two episodes made, and both are very high quality. In the first episode, went on TV last week, I praised Rowan Atkinson, who has managed to integrate himself into character roles since Mr Bean. The second episode suits him well too, and so the second case in Paris is still of high quality.
Shot very slowly with long takes and, of course, with the killers only revealed at the end of the episode. The story fits into the world of French detective fiction without any blemishes, Hungarian Budapest managed to successfully replace filming in Paris, it's cheap and has clever filmmakers. I noticed that a couple of minutes came directly from Paris around Notre-Dame.
The story of a group of Czechoslovakian emigrants who make a living out of murder is changed to Russian emigrants in the Czech dub. The filmmakers had to deal with the fact that there is a passage with a translator in the film, and it would have looked bad if they had translated into Czech-Czech. The dubbers' idea does change the point of the story a bit, but there is no other solution unless they wanted to make fools of people. The book and subtitled version can leave the Czech-Slovak criminals, it doesn't matter there, but the dubbed version has to be changed to make people understand the point of the case.
And the second part of Maigret with Rowan Atkinson was very good, a case from the 1950s. Century accurately depicts Paris of the time and shows fans of crime series what a proper period drama should look like.
Rating: 85%
Original release of this article January 7, 2019 – Kritiky.cz
