When seeing the name of Park Chan-Wook associated with a series, it is not a sin to expect “another renowned director surrendered to the world of television”, with all the ambiguities that such a quote entails in relation to the final result. Recent experience has given good results: let us remember Guy Ritchie with The Knights (Netflix) — but thinking quickly can be a trap. Chan-Wook is associated with another series. And we’re not talking about snow puncher, in which the South Korean has credit to the producer. Is about Drummer girlminiseries based on the novel by John Le Carré, with Michael Shannon, Alexander Skarsgard and Florence Pugh post-lady macbeth is pre-Midsommar in one of the best roles of his – still – short career. Drummer girl It’s a pearl, but it’s possible it’s one of those things you’ve never seen, especially since it went somewhat unnoticed between us. This can be solved in just under six hours, since the series is available on HBO Max, the platform where it debuts – this is new. The sympathizer.
still about Drummer girl: a spy series that explored the ins and outs of activity codes with great ease and internalized (as few productions have managed) the viewer’s knowledge. If at times we felt like a foreign body on that trip, the character of Florence Pugh accompanied us in that strangeness, we felt like her, defenseless and looking for a merely individualistic solution to get out of that tangle of counterspies in an Israeli setting. The time of a series allowed Park Chan-Wook to experiment with this, move back and forth, play with the viewer’s perception and expectations regarding the characters and the outcome. Throughout the six hours, we always felt insecure, on a tightrope, like a permanent test of our intelligence.
[o trailer de “The Sympathizer”:]
The code is then refined into The sympathizerAnother spy series, this one is an adaptation of the 2015 novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. Drummer girl, is not directed entirely by Park Chan-Wook, who only wrote the first three episodes (the other four are written by Fernando Meirelles and Marc Munden), but the script is written entirely by the South Korean in collaboration with Don McKellar (also one of the co-creators). In total, there are seven episodes about the story of a spy who finds himself in a constant duality between what he is, what he does and what he has to do.
At the center is a character we will only know as The Captain (Hoa Xuande); he has no name in the book. Where and when? End of the Vietnam War. The series begins with the captain as a political prisoner telling the story of the previous months. Each episode is a chapter of this story, which is recovered—or reconstructed—before the attention of the prison guards. And the appearances of stars like Sandra Ho or Robert Downey Jr. (who is also a producer) mainly serve the purposes of the protagonist – despite the special brilliance of Downey, who manages to occupy an essential place without being the main name of the plot, a skill that makes it look so good.
The beginning of the first episode provides us with the necessary doubts to take a step back from everything El Capitan says: we see him write the story of his departure from Vietnam and be forced to write it again, as if the versions he had given until then were not They were convincing, true or in line with the idea of a Hollywoodization of life. The question remains: Is the Captain telling you (and us) the truth or is he writing an imagined script about his life?
But playing with expectations is part of espionage. The sympathizer. The Captain is from North Vietnam and has infiltrated the military forces of the Southern forces, which are supported by the Americans. The Captain is a friend of the CIA and right-hand man of his general and, at the same time, he sends information to the communists and receives orders from them. One of them manifests itself in the first episode, when, during the fall of Saigon, The Captain prepares the departure of the soldiers with whom he works, implying that he does not plan to flee with them to the United States. However, his orders are for him to leave, so that he does not overlook the victory of the communists in his homeland and continue his journey to America as a spy.
Life in the United States is full of mystery and each episode offers aspects that are sometimes macabre and other times hilarious. Like we said, wandering The sympathizer There’s Robert Downey Jr., playing a number of characters and functioning almost as a kind of demon in the Captain’s conscience. As for the protagonist, in the United States he has to find the balance between the expectation of a new life there and maintaining his obligations as a spy.
Like in Drummer girl, Park Chan-Wook works all these layers as one should sculpt in a long work. Let’s put aside the idea of a long movie, let’s convince ourselves that time works wonders. Ripley is a good recent example of this—and this time it allows the viewer to generate feelings—affective and moral—about everything that happens in the narrative of The sympathizer. If for years the South Korean director delighted in addressing the theme of revenge in cinema (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, older boy either lady revenge), exploring Western conventions of suspense, on television seems to have found modern ways to play with the models of spy fiction. As in the movies, here we are well manipulated.
In The sympathizer There is a spy who is also the scriptwriter of his own spy story, constantly fueling the question of what truth are they telling us? If Florence Pugh were an anchor in Drummer girlHoa Xuande and his El Capitan are the storm, a storm that, as rarely happens, is welcome.
Source: Observadora
