That was just a few months ago.
At the (almost) end of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was thought that the world would change.
More beautiful, more virtuous, more sober.
This is obviously not the case and, like each of us at the time, the two heroines
Industry (1)
, the HBO-produced series that follows young financial sharks, attempt to cope with the bewilderment that has come with emerging from the pandemic.
Harper (Myha'la Herrold), the American and mixed-race outsider who won his place in the bank by dint of ambition, intelligence and cleverly planted knives in the back, telecommutes for a year in the suite of a hotel as impersonal as it is elegant.
And struggles to come out of its isolation, at the risk of becoming “invisible” in the eyes of its customers.
Yasmin (Marisa Abela, probable Amy Winehouse in a biopic which will be devoted to the singer), heiress to silk blouses, strives for her part to warm her increasingly cold heart in the busy nights of the City, between parties , sex and drugs at will.
To discover
Suri Cruise: Hollywood's spoiled little girl, or the story of a child demonized by the media
A pack of young wolves
Two young women, two atmospheres, two solitudes;
two ex-friends today at loggerheads (sorority is not really in order, in the trading room), whom we followed, trainees ready to do anything to get their job in the first season of
Industry
.
And that we find as well as Rob (Harry Lawtey), a young proletarian striving to adopt the codes of the environment.
Gus (David Jonsson), gone to find some semblance of meaning working for an MP.
Rishi (Sagar Radia), the son of Indian immigrants who is about to marry a girl from good English society who “has a podcast that tells you how to feel.”
Imperfect characters, cruel, sometimes united but often lost.
But whose complexity, and the spirit (illustrated by acid dialogues, and well-felt replicas) makes them impossible to hate.
In addition, this season, the manager of an investment fund, nicknamed “Mr Covid”, sitting on a highly coveted treasure, amassed during the pandemic.
And two women, one client, the other adviser, older,
In video, the trailer for season 2 of
Industry
Values to be exchanged
As in the first season, we still don't understand much of the financial jargon spewed out at full speed, in the bubble of their open-space, by these aspiring kings of the world, both in search of themselves and of sell the best investment.
This does not prevent us from savoring this game of massacre exacerbated by post-pandemic pressure, where moral values are exchanged, increase tenfold or deflate as well as those found on the markets: courage, Empathy, like respect, very quickly turns into cowardice or cruelty, depending on who distributes or receives them.
Like
Euphoria
and
Succession
, the two big series of the year (also from HBO),
Industry
plays on our fascination for two things: a generation that seeks to forget itself in what is most burning, and the extreme arrogance of the rich and powerful.
With a moral, underlying but very present: if money does not bring happiness, neither does youth.
A cathartic function, tenfold a hardness that we would never allow ourselves, and a sense of repartee that we would dream of possessing.
The whole perhaps holds up a strange mirror to us: troubled and disturbing, because strangely alive.
(1) Industry
season 2, by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, available on OCS