Film Reviews by NK

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*** A shocking insight into the activities of criminal gangs, when they combine their drugs-trade business with their people trafficking racket. A simple idea, but you'd have to be pretty evil to think of it - the addicts you sell drugs to are eventually bound to get heavily into your debt. The way out you offer them is if they marry a woman you're trafficking into the country - in this case from Albania - so that she can get Belgian citizenship. Of course, once your Lorna has her citizenship, the junkie husband is surplus to requirements and nobody will be surprised when he ODs, leaving Lorna free to remarry. A Russian "businessman" will pay a lot for a marriage of convenience to Lorna, which will in turn earn him EU/Belgian citizenship, but then of course he will want to have his own wife, so now Lorna becomes a liability. All this in a world where our failed war on drugs and our inept anti-immigration policies mean there will never be a shortage of the drug addicts and illegal immigrants that comprise the raw materials for this enterprise - in a parallel universe that exists cheek-to-cheek with ours, where the regular deaths of drug addicts and trafficked immigrants prompt nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders and occasional platitude from our moral guardians.

I don't hold with this idea of sticking with something (or someone) in the hope that I will find something worthwhile eventually. There's an old expression about first impressions and if you spend half an your in the company of someone whose antics are just tedious, annoying and unfunny, totally detached from any kind of story or plot or any reason to wonder what might be coming next, then it's probably not going to get any better. The film is of some historic interest, mainly because it was banned by the communist authorities - it would be interesting to know their reasons for doing so. Possibly it could have been because the censors didn't understand the film and just banned it to be on the safe side, in case it held a hidden message - old-school, Soviet-style authorities had plenty of form for that. However, communists could be progressive at times - to me it's possible that what they saw here was two scantily-clad, attractive young women being directed to cavort and act up and roll around on a bed together and generally just act like "naughty girls" for the gratification of some Eastern-bloc, Soviet era version of Harvey Weinstein. It's not my idea of empowerment - I gave up after about half an hour.

Gritty, fly-on-the-wall documentary-style drama from a bygone age. It's hard to imagine anything this explicit on 21st century television. Not just a historical document because the issues raised are still with us today.