Butler's Cinema Scene

“WOMEN AT WAR”(Netflix):  Four French women — a prostitute, a nun, a fugitive from the law and a well-to-do wife and mother — find their world upended with the outbreak of World War I in this impeccably produced eight-parter.

“Women…”  (in French the title is “Les Combattantes,”  which I much prefer) seamlessly blends brutal realism with soap opera-ish plotting;  the results are wildly entertaining.

Set in the Vosges region of France in the early days of the conflict (this was before things bogged down in the awful limbo of trench warfare), the series gives us female protagonists struggling to survive in the absence of their menfolk.

Caroline (Sofia Essaidi) is left to run the family’s truck factory while her husband goes off to war. Plus she struggles to hide her disreputable past from his disapproving family.

Nurse Suzanne (Camille Lou) is on the run from the law after a patient dies during an illegal abortion; she takes the identity of a dead woman and begins treating wounded soldiers at the convent/hospital run by the tormented Mother Agnes (Julie De Bona), who finds herself questioning her vows when she falls for a shellshocked patient.

Meanwhile prostitute Marguerite (Audrey Fleurot) silently watches over the son she abandoned twenty years earlier…the kid is now a soldier stationed nearby. 

The series is crammed with intrigue, romance, close calls and some very well staged battle scenes. What you’ll remember most is the ghastly parade of mutilated bodies.

Staunchly feminist without making any big speeches, the series gives us menfolk who range from a decent army surgeon to a skin-crawling pimp, a predatory priest, a revenge-obsessed police detective and a dissipated rich boy. Even the villains are presented as complex characters.

Toss into the mix French cinematic royalty like Tcheky Karyo and Sandrine Bonnaire, and you have an absorbing historic piece that blends the epic and the intimate.

Itzuiar Ituno

“INTIMACY” (Netflix): Also carrying a feminist cudgel is the Spanish eight-parter “Intimacy.”

Part political thriller, part angry dissection of contemporary male privilege, the show centers on Malek (“Money Heist’s” Itziar Ituno), deputy mayor of Bilbao. She’s a tough, talented woman aiming to run the city, but her plans are threatened with the release of a video showing her having sex on a French beach with a man not her husband.

The crisis has implications for both her career and her family, but is only the starting point for a half-dozen subplots centering on wronged women.

A high school teacher (Patricia Lopez Arnaiz) looks for answers to the suicide of her sister (Veronica Echegul), who was humiliated when a years-old sex video goes viral among her coworkers at a factory.

Malek’s teen daughter (Yune Nogueiras) is dealing with a jerk boyfriend who has shared their sexting photos with classmates.

And a female police detective specializing in sex crimes (Ana Wagener) — smells a bigger conspiracy in Malek’s sexual outing.

“Intimacy” offers some great roles for women.  The guys — not so much.  The male characters are much less nuanced, ranging from outright thuggery to bland nice guys.

At least there’s Malek’s husband Alfredo (Marc Martinez), torn between anger at his newfound status as poster boy for cuckoldry and his rueful continued support of his wife’s ambitions.

“Behind every great woman,” he shrugs, “is an emasculated man.”

“THE INVESTIGATION”(Hulu):  That old reliable the police procedural gets an inspired overhaul in this Danish miniseries, a docudrama recreation of one of that country’s most notorious murder prosecutions.

2017’s “submarine case” centered on the death of Kim Wall, a journalist who was last seen getting onto a homemade submarine owned and operated by a Copenhagen industrialist.  Days later her torso — sans head and limbs — was found floating in Koge Bay.

The six episodes from writer/director Tobias Lindholm center on the efforts of a homicide detective and a public prosecutor  (Soren Malling and Pilou Asbaek, both veterans of the excellent “Borgen”) to find enough evidence to indict the rich creep.

But “The Investigation” departs from every other crime drama in never depicting either the criminal or the victim.  We hear about the cops grilling the suspect…we never see it. As for the dead woman, we meet her grieving parents, but only see a photograph of her during the closing credits of the final episode.

Mostly the show zeroes in on the nuts and bolts of police investigation and the case’s flabbergasting million-to-one payoff:  the cops placed cadaver-smelling dogs on boats that crisscrossed the bay for days until they picked up the telltale gases of human body parts decomposing beneath the waves.

Driving the whole enterprise is the dogged determination of the homicide detectives, who fight through numerous reversals and dead ends — along the way risking their own mental/emotional stability — to get justice for the dead woman.

| Robert W. Butler