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“Sky Rojo” stars Lali Espósito, Verónica Sánchez, Yany Prado: hunted down on the vacation island
Photo: Tamara Arranz / Netflix
The Las Novias Club brothel sits enthroned in the red dust of the island of Tenerife like a rusted spaceship.
For male customers, a party is staged inside the house every day from morning to night, with salsa and tango, water games and young women dancing on various stages.
For the women who work in the brothel, however, the club is a prison.
The pimp Romeo (Asier Etxeandia) wears his hair greasy long according to the fashion of the branch and proclaims about his staff, who are often deported from Cuba or Eastern Europe and from whom he has taken their passports: "They do everything for me - because they think I'm the only one, who feels something for her. ”Who is surprised that three of the whores hit Romeo in episode one of the series“ Sky Rojo ”with a boom in the skull?
The Spanish series maker Álex Pina and his co-writer Esther Martínez Lobato are famous as great riot boxes in the industry.
In the highly acclaimed, spectacularly successful series "Haus des Geldes" (starting 2017, fifth season this summer), you told of a gang of anti-tank crackers led by a brilliant guy named Professor who first broke into the Spanish banknote printing plant and then into the National Bank of Madrid.
And in “White Lines” (2020) they turned an apparently extremely well-behaved British woman into the heroine of a wild drug, murder and family drama in Ibiza.
One of its highlights is that the heroine punishes a gangster extensively with a high-pressure cleaner.
Pina once announced that the greater the horror of your own ideas when writing the script, the better the work.
A great, by no means profound, pleasure
The series »Sky Rojo«, which is now starting on Netflix and is initially set to last eight 25-minute episodes, is about the escape of three prostitutes from the Las Novias Club.
Coral (Verónica Sánchez), Gina (Yany Prado) and Wendy (Lali Espósito) rush through the beautiful landscape of Tenerife in a red convertible.
You are looking for medical support from a client who, as a veterinarian, has only limited competence in the care of stab wounds in women's bodies.
They clash with a security guard who surprises them in their sleeping quarters.
And they use psychotropic drugs and drugs in ways that can lead to breakdowns.
In many scenes, this series looks as if the creators had mixed up “Trainspotting”, “Pulp Fiction” and “Thelma & Louise”.
In fact, an advertiser for "Sky Rojo" came up with the slogan that it was "Latin Pulp".
It is a great, but by no means profound, pleasure to watch the three main actresses panicking plans and loitering at hotel swimming pools.
Coral, Gina and Wendy come from different corners of the world.
With the courage of three women who seemingly have absolutely nothing to lose, they plunge into the fight against their persecutors.
They shoot revolvers, rush through wild nature and play jokes with two hollow-headed killers who think they are too sensitive for the job.
In the few quiet seconds of the hunt, the heroines ponder the "parallel universe" of prostitution, from which they have temporarily escaped.
"Does it ever stop that men are customers for us?" Asks Coral once.
"Sky Rojo" is obviously intended as an educational project.
The action packaging should work »like a Trojan horse«, says Álex Pina.
One wants to "catch" the audience with facts about the trade of human traffickers and pimps, especially when they are having a great time.
Coral's off-screen voice instructs the audience that in a European comparison, men in Spain are said to be the most likely to go to prostitutes.
They are the third most avid brothel users worldwide.
Retrospective sequences show how women like Gina in Cuba are recruited for hotel jobs in Spain and, rarely in the country, are they forced into prostitution because of alleged debts.
In an accusatory tone, the series also reports that the enslavement of women would not be possible without the tolerance of the authorities in Spain and other European countries.
Simple dialogues, bizarre image of women
The credibility of the series inventors, however, is only partially supported by the way in which women in "Sky Rojo" are portrayed as radiantly beautiful avengers who are constantly threatened with even more creepy mutilations if they are captured.
The images in the series are brightly colored and cut rapidly, often underlaid with pleasing hard rock;
the performers have been carefully selected.
But the sentences that you have to say are often absurdly simple.
"We were like injured animals on the run, leaving a trail of blood behind them," claims one of the heroines.
Is that fun trash?
No, sayings like this prove that Álex Pina's Trojan action project also conveys messages whose meaning would have been worth considering more thoroughly.
