Netflix presents "La Laundry", with Meryl Streep | …

It's been six years and four feature films that Steven Soderbergh has decided to withdraw from film shouting "that movies do not count anymore". It is therefore a radical decision followed by regrets, a temporary whim or a blow of advertising effect, because it has well ignored its own imprecation: the films always count. At least they care about it. In addition to going behind the cameras for a handful of episodes of series The trinket and Mosaic, the director of Sex, lies and video recently, three different titles, full of energy and ideas: hilarious and underrated. The Logan scam -Who found the pleasures of capersby dressing them with a significant class struggle component – the intense thriller Disturbs, shot in just ten days, and a stimulating story focused on weaving and political and economic management in the professional basketball sector, Big flying bird, produced for Netflix. The romance with the platform Red N continues with the global launch, Thursday, October 18, of The laundromat, an admonitory satire on the destructive fields of the capitalist economy pushed to the extreme, drawn from the famous real case of the Panama Papers. With a troupe of characters led by Meryl Streep and a sense of humor that obscures a tragic event – triggering in turn a series of intertwined frames – the last Soderbergh may not be among the best in his filmography but it is transformed, through a misleading comic and some dramatic elements, into a point of attention for the solution of global problems. In the end, it is Streep herself – who plays in the film not one but two roles – who removes the wig and adjusts the hair to directly question the viewer, looking straight ahead, in the manner of Chaplin in The great dictator, according to scriptwriters Scott Z. Burns and Jake Bernstein (the latter is a reporter specializing in futures market analysis). It's the economy, stupid, but we should do something about it.

Based very freely on Bernstein's research book Secret world, which analyzes the complex patterns of money laundering in tax havens to avoid paying taxes, The laundromat It starts with a scene that could be part of a Monty Python drawing. Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, perfectly dressed and holding a sophisticated drink in their hands, resolutely "big" in their quality of new rich, travel through a prehistoric digital diorama and walk in front of a homo sapiens tribe, succinctly describing the changes in concept. Monetary exchange: from barter to the appearance of the gold standard and from there to the birth of primitive capitalism. The viewer still does not know, but they are – no more and no less – Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, heads of the Mossack-Fonseca study, the Panamanian law firm accused of laundering money from individuals and companies around the world, from Germany to Syria, from Brazil to Libya and from Spain to Argentina. Fictitious characters, of course, drawings of these powerful men and metaphors showing how many ghostbusters exist in the world. "It's too easy to turn them into bad guys," Soderbergh said on the occasion of the film's world premiere at the recent Venice Film Festival, adding with humor that he "wished they'd all the possible chances of convincing the public that they are not the villains of the film In this sense, The laundromat could be described as the top of the recapitulation Of course, this approach required two naturally charming performers. Oldman and Banderas connected instantly. After this prologue, which leads to a kind of disco with a mythical (and infernal) subsoil, reality begins to occupy the screen in the first of a series of clearly identified chapters with ad hoc separators . A retired couple (Streep and the great James Cromwell) get on a small boat to spend a day of rest and recreation. The tragedy hits hard and Soderbergh films the scene as if it 's been a miniature disaster movie. What follows for the widow, named Ellen Martin, marks the beginning of a fierce and difficult struggle to get an answer from the insurance company. Answer that, of course, will never happen as expected: in a twist worthy of the Marx brothers, the insurer was reinsured by another insurer. The tip of a thick ball, the first glimpse of the black hole, Pandora box activation button spooky companies, offshore companies and all this money deposited in countries very little visited by tourism .

The secret machinery

Jake Bernstein, winner of two Pulitzer Awards and author of books such as Vice and The Wall Street Slot Machine, says in the prologue of Secret world that "money taken away by this secret world" is no longer available to pay for infrastructure costs, build schools or police communities. This has led to a spiraling increase in real estate in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and London. The wealthiest, eager to deposit their money in safe assets, see their prices go up even more when they own property at these locations. (…) The biggest abusers of the secret world are the multinational companies that base their operations on sites offering a minimum of taxation and a maximum of confidentiality. places like Delaware, the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg. After being exposed, the leaders of Mossack-Fonseca insisted that they were no different from these companies. They simply behaved in the same way as accountants, bankers, lawyers and trust companies, every day. They were right. The interesting thing about the adaptation of these ideas to the cinema, whose final result is none other than that of The laundromatit is the decision to be relegated to the major mechanisms and powers in a contextual context and to opt for a drama core focused on the particular and indirect consequences on certain individuals, mainly victims. It's the same strategy that Soderbergh had already put into practice in movies like Erin Brockovich or Traffic -The spider's web as a frame and the detail of a person stuck in it as an axis- although here the tone is closer to The misinforming that of the oiled drama of these famous and famous titles. Of these people (The laundry it's a film about coral), Ellen Martin stands out from the first moment. After accepting a contract with the insurer much cheaper than expected, she wants to buy an apartment in the city of Las Vegas, for purely emotional reasons. The real estate saleswoman played by Sharon Stone appears, with not very encouraging news for the buyer: the rule of cash, especially when everything is together and in carefully squeezed packages. For the character of Streep, the authors decided to apply the thousand and one shots, and empathy is guaranteed from the first minute. When the unexpected heroine decides to take the bull by the woods and to go to one of these tax havens, with the mission to find the culprits of their ills, the film returns to the country of 39; cathartic absurdity.

At the press conference of the film at the Venice Film Festival, Meryl Streep said the story "is a fun, fast and fun way to tell a very black joke. A joke that we spent for everyone. It's a crime that makes victims and many of these victims are journalists. The Panama Papers are the result of the work of nearly three hundred investigative journalists. Some of them died for that. Like Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist from Malta who was investigating people belonging to the government of her country and their links with tax havens: her car exploded in front of her house, with her car inside. And people continue to die. This film is fun, but at the same time, it is very, very important. "At 56, Soderbergh does not seem to owe anything to anyone and the extreme, squealing and extreme forms of his latest production seem to be the answer to an imaginary. The laundromat parallel, serious, desire for prestige and appointments to the main industry awards. In fact, when the story finally seems to be focused on a central path, assembly and division into chapters – with sporadic appearances of Banderas & Oldman, always swallowed by hand, into digital paradises generated by chroma– They lead on secondary roads, stories that, in their brevity and intensity, recall the 60s fashion street movies. A businessman from the Belgian Matthias Schoenaerts travels to China to try to bribe a Powerful Family Linked to Political Power The result is a piece of camera that momentarily turns the film into a suspense story, a game of cats and mice where the quality of the feline or rodent constantly changes position. The day his daughter celebrates the university degree at all costs, a businessman, another ostentatious rich new person (Nonso Anozie), sees how an act of unfaithfulness endangers the family and professional balance by using again the power of money to silence and hide (it looks serious, but this segment is so crazy that it touches the grotesque). On a small island, the incarnated broker with the usual grace by Jeffrey Wright receives an unexpected visit from a woman, eager to discover what is behind the screen of his company. It is then that the threads begin to shape the rope.

The last big joke

In Venice, the director of The big scam He said that "the humor gave us the opportunity to use the enormous complexity of this type of financial business as it was". a big joke. There are precedents in the cinema that have surely influenced us. The most obvious is perhaps that of Unusual doctor, Kubrick's film that took a very serious subject and turned it into a very black comedy. If I had done it differently, I think the viewers would have come to believe that we were educating them instead of entertaining them. "Despite these statements, there is a lot of education in The laundromat, designed largely to generate in the public a feeling of anger, almost offended, at the individual and collective consequences of the actual functioning of the capitalist economy on a large scale, legal loopholes and buracos of a system that allows to a certain type the operations are practicable and even welcome (at one point, Barack Obama appears on the screen saying something similar). The rest is a narrative game with big stars and many unexpected cameos, a project that Soderbergh seems to lose his mind but, judging by the final diatribe, he is very interested, perhaps more ideologically than artistic. Meanwhile, the wheel of the economy continues to turn and Ellen Martin of this world – the movie seems to be saying – will continue to exist unless we all do something for it. to avoid. Meanwhile, the leak of confidential information allows big and small fictional wolves to receive something similar to their little fictional catharsis deserved for a much wilder world than the one pictured on the screen.