Death Becomes Them: Review of the series "White Lotus"
Capitalism on fire - the rich often cry while being taunted by HBO Max's surprise summer hit.
Hawaii, elite resort hotel "White Lotus". On a seven-day vacation, a batch of new guests from the United States arrives - flighty, lost, lonely, exceptionally privileged. Island carelessness turns into scandals, a demand for a superior room, a robbery and one murder.
In the pilot episode of Lotus, hotel manager Armand (Australian Murray Bartlett) is surprised to discover that one of his employees is pregnant (he and others believed that the girl had simply gained weight). As it turned out, this is only the beginning of Armand's troubles in particular and the entire location as a whole, as if some kind of curse hangs firmly over the sun-drenched paradise with the underwater world, turtles and scuba gear. Not bulging Shyamalan, but sarcastic, knitting both language and mind, completely lying on the surface.
One should not expect inspiration from Agatha Christie from Lotus, although such an exposition by White is indeed set in the same pilot - you will have to guess about the name of the victim until the epilogue. The author takes genuine pleasure in the depravity of his non-heroes, is completely immersed in the poisonous, contagious dynamics of the relationship of “naked kings”, splashes in satire, while the characters on the shore try the water with their toes for a long time, not daring to go into it. It is more appropriate to compare the project with the Oscar-winning "Parasite": the American remake of Adam McKay seems to be a deliberately useless idea, because everything conceived has already been said in the original. White manages to throw in a few words about class (the former universal plague) and even peeps into the territory of traces of colonialism still strong in the mind.
In the selection of characters in this six-hour play, White has, if not the most stellar, then definitely unexpectedly effective carte blanche. Orphaned Tanya (absurdly touching, hallucinogenic Jennifer Coolidge) flew to Hawaii to dispel the ashes of her mother - a woman who did not love her, a mental terrorist who descended into the coffin, obviously offended by something. Duty is duty, Tanya wants to follow the traditions, at the same time making friends with the masseuse Belinda, not out of malice promising her mountains of gold (opening her own spa center). “Death is the only immersive experience I haven’t tried yet,” Tanya says towards the end of her vacation when she finds her dying lover. Belinda can wait, it's not every day you stop being lonely.
Shane and Rachel (Jake Lacey and Alexandra Daddario) are both socially and emotionally on different levels. Love at first sight won't be enough, as Shane's thoughts will be on getting a more luxurious suite and talking to his mother, who came on her honeymoon as a surprise. Rachel's dissatisfaction with relationships and her own poverty will accumulate more and more actively and go as a bonus to her loneliness, buried under the sand of journalistic ambitions.
The Mossbacker family is strictly hierarchical: mother Nicole (Connie Britton) runs her own media empire and even on vacation is looking for the right angle and filter for a video conference with colleagues from China. Her husband Mark (Steve Zahn) is experiencing the emergence of a possible testicular cancer, suffering from a suddenly discovered cause of death of a long-gone father, afraid of not justifying parental hopes. “White straight men are now in the losers,” Mark complains, whether it was before.
Daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney from Euphoria) came with her friend Paula: codependency, childhood resentment, reading Freud and Nietzsche for every day outfit. In the end, after trials of friendship and a failed holiday romance, the girls move on to a discourse about the very colonialism that they themselves had partially initiated earlier, and Lacanian seminars. Their outcast brother Quinn (Fred Heckinger) will have better luck: accidentally drowning his game consoles in the ocean, he will discover his passion for canoeing and want to stay on the island forever. If anyone is destined to break out of the family crypt and the accompanying suffocation, then, obviously, he, innocently naive, with a crazy but come true dream.
"Lotus" is built on the endless confrontations of heroes, mixed into a sardonic acid cocktail of sharp observations and wild, excited, offended by too good a life of hard-hitting personalities. An auxiliary, closely related and at the same time separate medium is the soundtrack by Cristobal Tapia de Veer - animal, erotic-tropical, opening all the chakras at once, everything that the heroes gradually come to emotionally, having arrived from megacities and from charity balls. The reconfiguration does not work, the vomit of one of the heroines ends up in the ocean, where majestic turtles have just swum, the whole procession pollutes the air, their own existence and that of others.
Manager Armand's duplicity and a set of interchangeable masks are gradually getting bored: he steals a bag of banned substances and painkillers from the younger Mossbackers, starts taking it himself, flirts and has a sexual relationship with a subordinate, literally defecates on the things of a meticulous client. In his world, no one is eternal: after healing massages, someone will get to the plane by bus, someone will be imprisoned in a wooden sarcophagus without a return ticket; the island will chew and regurgitate slightly changed tourists and intermediaries.
Sometimes the showrunner cuts the lines (we won’t see an emergency labor worker again in the series), gets carried away by one of the inhabitants of the terrarium or chuckles at them not hard enough, but on the whole it presents a fascinating, rare for television excursion into the land of unlearned lessons, where death is all- inclusive. Those who took advantage of the final option breathe a sigh of relief. The ocean, as it was silent and imperturbable, remained so - we do it island style, they sing together in the final song, continue to be deeply unhappy.
This article was sponsored by Clement George
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