Review Blind Spot (orig. Doudege Wénkel) [2012]| poetslandscape

IMDb listing

Blind Spot (orig. Doudege Wénkel) [2012] directed and cowritten by Christophe Wagner along with Jhemp Hoscheid and Frederic Zeimet is a crime thriller from Luxembourg that played recently at Chicago's 16th Annual European Union Film Festival held at the Gene Siskel Film Center in downtown Chicago.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a tiny country (a constitutional monarchy) nestled between Germany, France and Belgium.  Tiny though it is, its history is ancient.  Its royal family stretches its roots back to Charlemagne.  Its all too strategic location between put it on Germany's invasion route of Belgium and France during both World War I and World War II.  American readers/history buffs here will probably most remember Luxembourg for having been the site of much of the fighting during the 1944 Battle of the Bulge.  Small, yet strategic, made Luxembourg a founding member of both NATO and the European Union following World War II.

The tininess of Luxemburg repeatedly plays a fascinating subtextual role in this current film.

First, the film is above all a police drama.  Brothers Olivier and Tom Faber (played by Jules Werner and Mickey Hardt respectively) are police officers, cops, in the City of Luxembourg.  As such, their characters speak and most of the film is filmed in the local language Luxembourgish (with English and French subtitles.  Apparently, Luxembourgish is close enough to standard (High) German that there wasn't a need for subtitling into German as well). One simply can't be a "beat cop" or otherwise LOCAL cop without being able to speak the LOCAL language.

Then characters, both foreign and local speak throughout the film in Luxembourgish, French or German (with the occasional English pop-cultural term finding its way into the characters' speech patterns as well).  And the character's language preferences are all significant to the story:  Tom (one of the two brothers) is found dead early in the story.  The Luxembourger investigators put themselves in contact with a crime lab in Hamburg (Germany) to investigate it.  Then a young Belorussian prostitute named Elina (played by Irina Lavrinovic) who was one of the last people to see Tom alive is brought in for questioning and talks to investigators in French.

What would a young attractive Belorussian prostitute be doing in Luxembourg to begin with?  Well, tiny countries like Switzerland (small), Luxembourg (smaller), San Marino/Andorra (still smaller) and Monaco (smallest) need reasons to exist.  In almost all these cases, these small countries have been ("wink, wink") financial and in some cases gambling centers.  And Luxembourg is, indeed, a banking center, and the seat of various finance related institutions of the European Union, including the European Investment Bank.  Where these is money, there's fertile ground for corruption (and crime thrillers ... ;-).  So Tom's contact with this prostitute serves as only the tip of a proverbial iceberg that involves all kinds of characters, both Luxembourger native and foreign, that have (and have had) reasons to come to, stay and leave this little largely city-state of Luxembourg.

However, the story is not simply about financial or linguistic intrigue.  At its core, it's about two brothers.  And actually Tom, who was found dead near the beginning of the story, had been considered by all to be the "better" of the two.  He had been the stellar cop while Olivier had been the volatile screw-up.   Tom had had a nice stable family including two small children.  In contrast, Olivier's wife was leaving him and they were childless.  Imagine therefore the internal conflict that Olivier would have faced after finding out that his "perfect brother" had spent a good part of his last hours with a young Beolorussian prostitute.  And yet, Tom was his brother, who had two young children and Tom and Olivier had a mother who had simply adored Tom ... What to say / do?

So it all actually makes for a rather compelling (and supremely contemporary European) crime thriller (with all those languages and much intrigue).  I'm honestly glad to have seen it, and feel that I've learned something about Luxembourg that previously I knew little about as a result.  Good job!

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