Recently I have been watching a crime show on
Netflix called “The Sniffer.” It is in Russian with English subtitles. After
looking it up on Wikipedia just now, I find it is actually a Ukrainian show,
though I was right in thinking the language was Russian. (My Russian goes no
further than “nyet” for no.)
I started watching the show because of the premise—a
detective who relies on his super-sophisticated sense of smell to solve crimes.
Smell is an underrated sense and I wanted to see what they would do with it.
I’m inclined to think they give smell way too much
credit for dramatic purposes. Estimating the age of the person who handled a
piece of paper? And surely all the surrounding smells must create a lot of
interference—other people who may have handled the paper earlier, for instance,
or the drawer that it was stored in…
At the same time, I have to remind myself that
dogs do some impressive things with their sense of smell, so perhaps not all the
detective’s conclusions are as exaggerated as I think. And he does do research
when a smell puzzles him. Most recently he bought dozens of strawberry yogurt
products in an effort to determine what brand had that particular scent, on the
grounds that the perpetrator likely worked at a yogurt factory.
Another interesting thing is the way the show
attempts to depict the smells, using misty outlines to suggest traces of people
in the air and flashing images of the specifics (the strawberries, e.g.) so
that we don’t just see the detective sniff the object and then say, “Ah, a
forty-year old man, non-smoker, and some sort of strawberry aroma, perhaps
yogurt.”
Naturally the show is not all about crime and
smells. There are story arcs for the people themselves—the detective, his love
interest, his estranged wife who pops tranquilizers, his troubled son, and his
partner who eats a lot of hamburgers and hits on women. Does his wife really
want him back? I can’t tell. She’s a sly one, and kind of a mess.
I also keep looking for clues that this story is
taking place in Russia (though I guess it’s actually the Ukraine—why “the”
Ukraine? Is that just how I learned to say its name?) The lettering on signs is
an obvious clue, and the police department (if that’s what it is) certainly
looks unusual, but otherwise it’s hard to tell where it is taking place. Maybe
I don’t know what to look for. I do notice that all the women who aren’t either
quite old or quite young seem to wear clothes that show a lot of cleavage. That
might just reflect the TV producers chasing ratings, though.
Thinking about it, I wonder if the furnishings are
different. Some are clearly ultra-modern, all glass and spare lines and
probably quite expensive, while others seem somehow old-fashioned. Perhaps what’s
missing is the recliners and contemporary furniture. I’ll have to pay more
attention in future shows.
I’d like to give interesting examples of places
where the subtitles appear to miss the mark, using some odd expression that
probably should have been translated differently, but unfortunately I didn’t
write any down and can’t remember them now. I do remember one scene where the
detective’s wife Iulia comes to see him and mocks him via security camera about
his elevator, saying something that sounds
a lot like “super-duper lift.”
Anyway, I’m having fun, though I suspect I wouldn’t
still be watching if it were just another American TV show. Then again, maybe in that case I would discover that it actually has ingeniously clever dialogue.
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