Trailer for the series "A Boy Devours a Universe"/Netflix
"Boy Swallows Universe", the beautiful Australian drama series of Netflix, is a work that is easy to mistake.
You have to approach her with patience, because she distributes her beauty stingily, at least at first.
In the first two episodes, it seems that she prefers to present us her heroes and their world at the height of their ugliness, and only those who succeed in this phase will reach the real prize - a poetic and charming series with captivating heroes, which progresses at a pace that does not stop for a moment.
I admit - I almost fell into the trap.
Half an hour into the viewing I wrote a message to my editor, and asked if there was any possibility that he would take me off the task of writing this review.
Half an hour into the first episode and I already felt that I had suffered enough.
As we know, we live in difficult times, the mind longs for things that are light or at least easy to digest, and "A Child Swallows a Universe", especially in its first two chapters, is not always like that.
Even before I could get to know the characters, understand the world in which the plot takes place, I was already attacked by scenes of violence of varying degrees of difficulty.
Crime, bullying, animal abuse - there's everything here.
Sometimes it's just gross - like the scene where the kids fall into the sewer and find themselves literally submerged in shit;
And sometimes it's as blatant and violent as the opening scene, which aggressively takes us into a moment in the life of the protagonist, 13-year-old Eli, where his stepfather got involved in some shady drug deal, and now the bad guys are holding his family and threatening to do terrible things.
And then we do them.
Fortunately, I recognized among all the violence and nastiness the beauty that the series tried to hide.
Although it was difficult for me to pass some of the scenes, the excellent writing and the astonishing acting kept me in front of the screen, and I quickly found myself both captivated by the plot and emotionally involved in the lives of the heroes.
Amazing game for such a young kid.
Felix Cameron, "A Boy Who Swallows a Universe"/Netflix
This is a television adaptation of seven complete and overflowing episodes, to the popular bestseller by Trent Dalton.
It's a coming-of-age story through the eyes of 13-year-old Eli Bell, but the world he sees is hopeless and disgusting.
The series presents hyper-realistic violence but breaks it up with fantastical elements and surprisingly colorful humor.
Somehow, for all its bleakness, it is never dark.
The boy Eli (Felix Cameron, in an amazing performance for such a young boy) is trying to find a foothold in his chaotic world, where his peace of mind and his childish life depend on every whim of the adults around him.
His mother Frankie (Phoebe Tonkin, "The Vampire Diaries") is a drug addict in rehab, which is fine, except for the fact that her partner Lyle is an undercover drug dealer.
Eli suffers severe bullying at school, and his only friends are his older brother Gus (the charming Lee Haley), who stopped talking one day but writes messages in the air and sometimes predicts the future;
And a famous (former) criminal named the excellent Salim Holliday (the veteran Brian Brown, who you know from a million movies), who sometimes babysits him and gives life advice (which Eli usually ignores).
Oh, and there is also his pen pal, who is in prison for murder, and Eli narrates his story (thus providing us with the required narration in every televised coming-of-age story).
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It's hard to spot him here.
Simon Baker, "A Boy Who Swallows a Universe"/Netflix
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We are given bits of information about the characters and their situation in the world, in a measured and calculated way, but casually.
There is no overflowing exposition here, but small moments of understanding when a little more of the background story is revealed.
We run with Eli the child, and then the teenager (played by Zach Burgess), as he tries his best to keep his life and that of all his loved ones from falling under his feet.
The sense of urgency, the terror that lies beneath all moments, even the good ones, and the fear that everything could be taken from him at any moment, accompanies a large part of this story.
The music in the background always gives another dimension of tension to the scenes, representing the fear that always lives in the child's soul.
All this is written with great beauty, even poetic at times - probably thanks to the literary source.
The almost lyrical sentences contradict the cruel and disgusting reality, and emphasize it.
In general, "A Boy Swallows a Universe" really tries to present us with ugliness as a concept.
To describe to us the depressing world in which it takes place, the bleakness of life in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia in the 1980s, the directors and set designers certainly used all the means at their disposal.
The aesthetics of the series are slime aesthetics.
Life at the bottom of people's day is hard.
Even beautiful actors look faded and ugly, with shaggy beards or wearing a "mullet" haircut that does not flatter anyone.
For example, you will find it difficult to recognize Simon Baker, the beauty from "The Devil Wears Prada" and "The Mentalist", here in the role of the absent father of the boys, who suffers from agrophobia and becomes really crazy when he is drunk, which is all the time.
We will learn to love all these people during the series, but at the beginning it is really hard to contain such a wealth of ugliness and intentional violence.
The creators want to make it clear to us immediately that we have reached a dead end.
A place without hope.
Eli tells us in the very first sentences that he grew up in a crime town and always knew there was nowhere to run.
The people around him are either scum or just plain losers, who nevertheless keep trying, hoping to change their screwed up fate.
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Poet and beauty behind the ugliness.
"A Boy Swallows a Universe"/Netflix
The pace of the series is accurate for most of the series, event follows event in a logical way, and the action moments are conditioned by humorous scenes and the wonderful dynamics between the characters.
Apparently it is a completely chaotic plot, but there is always a feeling that everything is flowing forward, pushing to a certain point.
Unfortunately, the balance doesn't hold for the last episode, where big and weighty events were squeezed into half an hour, and a big reveal that could have been the subject of its own season gets a strange use here - almost like a dous ex machina, the big twist is just a tool used to close all the issues The heavyweights at once.
It's a bit cheesy and disappointing, but doesn't change the fact that we got a satisfying ending to the crazy journey we've been on.
It's always a risk when a beautiful series chooses to cover itself in slime and shit, and works hard to make everything as less aesthetic as possible, to show us how violent and exposed everything here is.
It's an effective way of "see, don't tell" to teach us how hard life is, how awful.
But you have to be careful not to be too good at it, because not all viewers will stay for the soft and heartwarming part.
The fact that this excellent Australian series fell on us while we here in Israel are very aware of the fact that life can be cruel is doubly difficult.
But if you stay with her, "A Child Swallows a Universe" will show you that even in the piles of shit there is beauty and there are moments of kindness, and even when we seem to be rocked by life from side to side without control, there is always a spot of light at the end, there is always hope.
All episodes of "A Boy Who Swallows a Universe" are available on Netflix.
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