Sunday, January 21, 2018

La Casa del Papel (end of first series)

Throughout its 13 episode length, the Spanish heist movie, La Casa del Papel, remains exciting, clever, and surprising.  Although a couple of episodes late in the game flag a wee bit, the show remains compelling.  The film is effective throughout its ten-hour length because it develops characters who can only be described as extremely endearing.  The Professor, the criminal mastermind who engineers the robbery of the Spanish National Mint, earnestly wishes that the robbery will succeed without any one being killed or, even, injured.  Indeed, there's a quality of adolescent fantasy to the Professor, who is, after all, a character purloined it seems, from a comic book, a kind of post-pubescent boy-wonder -- he stages the robbery, in effect, as a homage to his deceased father.  And, everything would probably have developed as he anticipated except for the messy nature of human emotions -- the one thing that the Professor has not factored into his schemes is that the hostages and robbers will fall in love with one another, develop strange allegiances, and, generally, behave irrationally because, after all, the human heart is unpredictable and eros too powerful to be contained by mere reason.  So, the Professor ends up on a date with Raquel, the female police officer assigned the task of capturing him and, while they embrace, the woman cop's subordinate, a heavy-set bearded man who is hopelessly in love with Raquel, drunk and sloppy with his own jealous lust crashes his car -- and, thereby, delays the receipt of important information.  And while this is happening, a secretary at the Mint, who is having an adulterous affair with her boss (he's also a hostage), falls in love with one of the robbers and has sex with him -- this leads to a confrontation between the boss and the robber that is both scary and hilarious.  Meanwhile, a group of hostages, not properly guarded because of the romantic encounters subverting the whole project, escape from the building, triggering one of the most savage and ferocious fire-fights that I have ever seen on TV.  All of these calamities occur because of the propensity of human beings to console themselves (or eliminate boredom) with sex.  The interesting aspect of all this love and sex is that it's not really exploited by the filmmaker, rather the amours are rather sweet, somewhat like the roundelay of lovers in sophisticated European comedies, Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night for instance -- all these romantic complications are just a natural consequence when you put a bunch of young and attractive Spaniards together in close quarters.

Another key to the show's success, I think, is its steadfast refusal to minimize any of its characters.  The heavy-set lout who enjoyed a one-night stand with Raquel, the lady hostage negotiator (also his boss) isn't villainous, just misguided and tragically, obsessively romantic.  The heroine, in fact, loves him in her own way, something that merely deepens and makes more painful, the poor man's pathetic attempts to win her over to him.   The most sinister of the robbers, a man who has taken the malevolent-sounding name Berlin, acquires a harem of young hostage girls around him -- he treats them cruelly but they same to regard his sadism as a kind of game and, later, when we learn that he is dying slowly of a neurological disease, we have reason to understand, if not excuse, his bombastic harangues and scarcely repressed hysteria.  Most noteworthy are the two women playing Nairobi and Tokyo -- they are woman warriors with tight bonnets of slick black hair and they have glittering eyes and agile athletic bodies:  they are like the bull-jumpers of Knossos and the film gives them some of the best action sequences:  there's a splendid invigorating moment when Tokyo charges a breach in the wall pushing a huge heavy caliber machine gun into a hail of tracer bullets; in one scene, Nairobi leads choruses of hostages in wild wailing ululating cries while the rest of the robbers fire volleys into walls and ceilings, the gunman all wearing identical masks of a bemused, quizzical-looking Salvador  Dali.  Toward the end of the first season, one of wizened print-shop workers at the mint casts in his lot with Nairobi, calling her the "best boss" he ever had.  In fact, as the show ripens, Stockholm syndrome sets in and the motives of hostages and captors become increasingly confused and perplexing.

Viewers should be warned that this show is addictive and that it does not end at the conclusion of the 13 episodes in the first series -- in fact, the program is left radically unresolved:  the police are closing in, the relationship between Berlin and the professor seems to be explained, the Professor continues his romance with Raquel after almost murdering her mother (the woman is saved because the Professor understands that she suffers from Alzheimer's syndrome and can't recall that she has learned that he is one of the bad guys).  In a flashback, the Professor and Berlin sing Bella Ciao, a song with which I was unfamiliar -- it's a partisan anti-fascist song that, apparently, has currency with resistance movements around the world.  (You can hear a wonderful version of the song on You-Tube as performed by the great Argentine folk singer, Mercedes Sosa.)  The song begins with the words:  "as I awoke this morning, the invaders had come."  Although its nominally an anti-fascist song, who are the invaders here?  And who the partisans?  The song brings the show to a stirring but wholly inconclusive ending -- we'll have to wait until to see how this comes out. (Obviously the 2017 series was huge hit in Spain for its station Antena 3; the program was conceived and directed by Alex Pena.)

No comments:

Post a Comment