Saturday, November 6, 2021

'A Song For Europe' aka 'A Crime of Honor' (1985) – John Goldschmidt.

A profoundly gripping, albeit faintly sinister downbeat drama about the actions of Steven Dyer (David Suchet) a somewhat naïve, increasingly frustrated salesman for a large multinational drugs conglomerate based in picturesque Basel, Northern Switzerland, Dyer, acting on honest, seemingly altruistic motives, only semi-covertly hands over secretly photographed, profoundly incriminating company files to an independent organisation currently planning a thorough investigation on the gross business practices of the larger, more powerful corporations in the common market, exposing the myriad dirty deeds, corporate malfeasance, and all manner of financial skulduggery, and very soon Steven, and his family suffer the grievous consequences of his actions, with Dyer uncomfortably finding himself incarcerated on a serious charge of industrial espionage, which he angrily refutes to little avail; now frustratingly trapped within a plainly corrupt, and wholly biased Swiss legal system, facing the stark, existential nightmare of a further 20 years imprisonment! At this juncture in this enjoyably stolid TV movie, the already intense narrative becomes a rather glum, increasingly bleak affair, as Dyer's relatively carefree bourgeois existence is crudely demolished, and director John Goldschmidt's superbly written, if admittedly dour, agitprop drama takes an altogether darker descent towards its edifying, and witheringly grim conclusion. Overall 'A Song For Europe' makes for consistently engaging, singularly humourless entertainment, having much to recommend it, including the wonderfully sympathetic score by Carl Davis, the dazzlingly wholesome Swiss vistas are blissful to behold, and David Suchet's masterful performance as the ingenuous, if a little near-sighted whistle-blower made for a genuinely fascinating protagonist; his stoical struggles against an oppressively Kafkaesque, bureaucratic injustice made for rivetingly unsentimental drama. 


 

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