Your Voice Matters: A Review of the TV Series "Roar"
An almanac of tragicomedy stories from the authors of the series "Shrill"
Several stories intertwine in the Almanac: Alison Brie's heroine, as a ghost, investigates her own murder. Nicole Kidman cares for her mother, who has dementia: trying to keep power over her own memory, she eats pictures. A Western with Fivel Stewart, where two young ladies experience the value of friendship in the world of the Wild West and patriarchy. These and other heroines, each wanting to be heard and understood.
This adaptation of Cecilia Ahern's short story collection ("P.S. I Love You") is eight stories that, in their own way, answer the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" The thirty-minute chapters unfold in a fantasy way, hyperbolizing anything and everything. The staging is straightforward and witty to the extreme. The underlying theme is necessarily in the wrapper of metaphor, where everything can look like a dark fairy tale, but remain quite recognizable to the viewer. The mother of two children and part-time head of a company suffers from mysterious stings - guilt literally devours her from within; the young wife becomes her husband's trophy (again, literally - the girl sits all day on a shelf that her husband has personally made for her); and the seductive duck, the sweetest creature, starts manipulating her new girlfriend Merritt Weaver and gradually turns her against others (yes, you got that right, the talking bird is an abuser). We could go on and on about examples from the show, each of them unique and weird in a good way.
Gaslighting, misogyny, violence, and other "charms" of the female routine have been discussed by many. But perhaps for the first time the conversation is raised through the prism of surrealism, and the creators, by shedding light on all these aspects, make the problem pretentious and at times uncomfortable to watch. A drop of magic here does not save humanity from disaster, on the contrary, it makes the world uglier, to bring to light all the things that prevent women from breathing freely.
The Apple TV+ project, like most anthologies, suffers from a timeline. A collection of episodes with a stellar cast certainly speaks volumes, but hardly the full potential of a statement can be realized in a vague and short format. However, even if watching it leaves a bit of a muddled feeling, all of these stories somehow coalesce into a single shriek of millions of voices. They all say roughly the same thing, doing it poignantly and loudly, so, joining each one, I want to end with the words of the British feminists of the 1970s: "We are not beautiful or ugly, we are evil."
This article was sponsored by Katie DeRusso
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