La Casa de Papel

La Casa de Papel is a Spanish heist movie, broadcast on Netflix in 13 episodes, each about 45 minutes long.  I've seen five episodes at this point and have committed to the show -- if I look forward to streaming the show after work at night, I think I am warranted in recommending the program. 

Most TV shows of this sort contain lots of dead time -- the plot doesn't sustain the running time required for a 10 or 13 episode program.  This seems pretty clearly the case with La Casa de Papel, but oddly enough this series makes a virtue of its length by developing a number of extremely interesting and, even, moving subplots.  The characters are so interesting and their development so belated in terms of the narrative that we find the show compelling even though, at least some of it, feels like a long and complex delaying action.  La Casa de Papel works this trick in an obvious way but one that I haven't seen implemented too often in series TV shows.  The show charges into the narrative without any real plot or character development.  Almost all "heist" shows begin with establishing the team of criminals who will work together, or against one another, to engineer the theft -- this is the paradigm that we see in movies as disparate as The Asphalt Jungle and Riffi.  The script presents us with the characters, identifies their idiosyncrasies, and, then, lays out in detail the plan for the crime that will be committed -- again, Kubrick's The Killing is a good example of this style of film-making.  La Casa de Papel inverts this order of narrative -- with only a very bare sketch of the show's premises, the program advances into the complex heist.  By the middle of the first episode, the protagonists are engaged in their daring scheme to rob (or do something to) Spain's National Mint.  We aren't told the objective of the heist.  Similarly, we aren't afforded any clear understanding of the criminals involved in the plot.  The show moves forward in a kind of backhanded homage to Reservoir Dogs -- the eight criminals, acting under the direction of a genius mastermind, the Professor, are forbidden use of their real names.  Instead, they are told that they must select the names of cities and will be known by those appellations -- hence, we have characters called Moscow, Berlin, Boston, Denver, and Helsinki.  There's no plot development before the heist is inaugurated -- rather, the show makes the clever decision of using flashbacks to develop character as the narrative proceeds.  Similarly, there are 67 employees at the National Mint who are taken prisoner and, then, held hostage as the criminal scheme is developed -- we aren't shown much, if anything, about these characters as well; rather, the hostages are also developed as characters in the course of the siege of the National Mint which seems to last for the entire 13 episodes.  But, as the program proceeds, the plot takes all sorts of very interesting twists and turns and we become intensely enmeshed in the relationships between the criminals, the hostages, and the law enforcement detectives and negotiators involved in the siege.  The show seems to be very well written and is a combination of extremely ferocious and disturbing confrontations and a sort of queasy comedy.  There's nothing here, so far, that you haven't seen in other films -- in fact, one of the film's plot points, dressing both hostages and criminals in identical red jumpers (and masking their faces with bizarre  and identical Salvador Dali masks) comes directly out of an earlier movie, Spike Lee's The Inside Man (2006).  But La Casa del Papel ("The house of Paper" -- referring to the printing presses in the Mint) simply executes these motifs better and with sharper writing and more interesting characters.  By the fifth episode, all sorts of fascinating things have occurred:  the chief hostage negotiator, a weary female cop, is contending with her own history of domestic abuse and involved in a nasty divorce; her mother seems to have Alzheimer's although she is still vigorous and attractive, a kind of force of nature.  The Professor is boyishly attractive and tempted into a relationship with the hostage negotiator (a subplot that is a bit like Gillian Anderson's relationship with the serial killer in The Fall).  Told to execute one of the hostages, a young man hides the girl and seems to be falling in love with her.  She, in turn, is involved in a doomed relationship with the married Arturo, the director of the mint.  Arturo gets shot by accident and the father of the boy who has fallen in love with the blonde hostage -- Arturo's girlfriend, Monica -- tries to protect his son from the increasingly violent stand-off.  Spanish police are boring into the Mint through ventilation tunnels while the hostages are forced to drill a hole in the floor of the factory.  Berlin, one of the leaders of the criminals, seems to be degenerating into brutality -- the criminals were originally told that no one would be hurt during the heist, but Berlin seems to be some kind of sadist. Many of these elements in the show are presented in very sharp, effectively written, and, even, didactic dialogue -- there are debates about abortion, for instance, and use of violence, even terrorist violence, to make political points.  All the while, the criminals, who have become the de facto heroes of the show, are printing vast amounts of unmarked money in 50 Euro denominations.  Perhaps, the show will flag in the next few hours -- but, at this point, everything is moving along very effectively and the show is sufficiently exciting that I look forward to streaming an episode or two every night.