2024-01-03 13:50:39
BarcelonaIt is the title The Curse (the curse, in English) and certainly looking at it causes discomfort. The new series starring the actress Emma Stone (awarded the Oscar for best actress for La La Land) is a production that navigates between strangeness, drama and satire and has become, according to American critics, one of the best series of 2023. Stone, in fact, aspires to take the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Drama for her role in this fiction. The Curse was released in November in the United States (appears on the Best Fiction of 2023 list of New York Times), but due to internal policies of the platform that broadcasts it, in Catalonia we had to wait a few months to be able to see it. Finally, the series, the first big premiere of 2024, arrives this Friday on SkyShowtime, in which it will be broadcast in two installments. Five episodes will be available now, while the remaining five will be released on February 16.
The series revolves around a young couple who have arrived in Española, a New Mexico community marked by poverty and unemployment, ready to help its inhabitants. Stone plays Whitney, an architect heir to a lavish real estate empire, and duets with Nathan Fielder, who plays Asher. Together they are the image of the perfect couple (at least, out of doors): they have the speech about their philanthropic work well learned, they know how to convey it clearly and fluently and in interviews with the media they are aware that, above all above all, they must smile and never lose their cool.
The ideal life they project becomes watery when they enter the private sphere. Whitney came up with the concept of cases passives and begins to implement it in the community. It is about transforming buildings in ruins into spaces that are “100% sustainable, in balance with the environment and energy efficient” – but it turns out that the facades create a mirror effect and end up causing the death of birds, which crash into them. They also buy several premises in the area and turn them into cafes, shops for clothing and indigenous crafts under the pretext that they will only hire staff from the community and therefore are giving jobs to the people of Española.
Behind the banner of charity, however, Whitney and Asher are consciously driving the gentrification of the area. “We want this to be the new hip district, for people to want to live there because it’s cool,” they say to each other when the others aren’t listening. And, for this reason, they buy several plots of land at very low prices in the hope that, in a year’s time and with the effect of their strategy, they will have gained value and will be able to extract large profits from them.
However, sometimes things don’t go as planned. When Asher tries to back out after giving a little beggar a $100 bill just to look good, everything suddenly goes awry. The girl casts a curse on him (hence the title of the series) and he finds himself immersed in a spiral of unexpected misfortunes that plunge him further and further into failure.
A ‘reality show’ within the series
What behind – and in front – of The Curse having Fielder’s name on it is, at the outset, a guarantee of quality. Fielder, who in addition to performing in this production has served as co-creator with Benny Safdie and director, is the ideologue of successful fictions such as How to with John Wilson (considered one of the best series of 2023 by the ARA) i The essays. The strangeness that already appeared in his previous productions, a The Curse multiplies, especially due to an element that modifies the everyday life of the protagonists: while they carry out their solidarity work in Española, a peculiar director of reality showsDougie (Benny Safdie) accompanies them with audiovisual equipment while the cameras keep rolling.
In a curious game of metafiction, the couple is also the protagonist of Fliplanthropy, a documentary series with which they want to record the impact their actions have on the community. Dougie hides a manipulative and emotionally wounded personality and is convinced that in order for the documentary to do well, it needs to be as sensational as possible. In this way, his mission will be to enhance the conflicts between the protagonists and put sticks in their wheels without them knowing about it.
Gentrification and the white man savior complex of indigenous communities are just the starting point of a series that intelligently questions the contradictions of certain environmental movements, the use of personal traumas to sell artistic creations and individualism in the 21st century. The atmosphere of constant discomfort between increasingly lost protagonists and the pace of the plot, contained and suffocating, make The Curse a disturbing fiction that is difficult to look away from, without forgetting the touches of humor that break with the strangest moments. The series doesn’t clarify whether the curse on Asher is real or not, and it doesn’t need to be; after all, it is the psychological depth of its protagonists and how episode after episode they are dismantled that makes it one of the titles to consider this 2024.
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