Red Light

 A high prestige flemish / dutch television series, Red Light goes about the trafficing of prostitutes between Antwerp and Amsterdam.

Starring Carice Van Houten (Mellisandre from Game of Thrones), it is fun to see how my GF's old appartment block seemingly is a large brothel.

Well, tourists coming for that are going to be in for a large disappointment...

The series revolves around three women: an elderly prostitute that finds out her lover and pimp is actually using her, as he has a nice homely family, a young police detective struggling with an alcohol addicition, and an opera singer who is searching for her missing husband, a university professor.  When his body is found in the Schelde, his wife goes to look for him, coming into contact with Sylvia, the prostitute.  The latter is pregnant from her pimp, and against his wishes decides to hold the baby.

Slowly but surely the women get closer entertwined, as Sylvie tells Esther the baby is her husband's, and that he was madly in love with her.  Evy on the other hand tracks her down in the Netherlands as they flee to an another villa outside Amsterdam, pursued by Ingmar and his hitman.  In the house, the three women come together just as Ingmar arrives.

We learn that Evy's partner at the police force, Sam, is actually on the payroll of the trafficers, and has been relaying the information Evy send him.  The whole thing plays out a bit, well, far fedged if you ask me in the series finale, and I must say I have seen better flemish series so far...

Now, no matter how fine the series is, about 20 years ago there was another series about this topic, Matroesjka's, and Red Lights really pales compared to that.  Ingmar, the pimp, is like a thin copy of the legendary character Ray Van Mechelen, as are his cronies.  To be honest, around episode 4 it lost it's raunchyness and became more of a hotch-potch, loosing my attention.  Heck, I guess in the end the only thing that I`ll remember is the excellent opening music, Control, performed by Warhaus.

While enjoyable ar first, if you seen the older series, this one isn`t shocking or revelating at all...