From
Fargo
, the
Fargo
of the Coen brothers, the film that starred an already fabulous Frances McDormand, and whose spirit survives in each of the seasons of the series of the same name that Noah Hawley signs, the
cinematographic and television
noir
has not returned to be the same.
Fargo
sharpened one of the many aspects that
Twin Peaks
rehearsed
, the one really responsible for the expansion of the genre - along with the very idea of the television serial.
Which?
The one to let the plot be a background noise, something that the very experienced characters have to simply deal with, while they deal with everything else.
They are the mystery.
What has happened no longer has a remedy.
Freeing himself from the imposition of the plot, which tends to need archetypal reactions that dilute the weight of the characters and turn anything into a copy of a copy,
Fargo
propelled himself, like
Twin Peaks
, to another level, allowing
audiovisual
noir
- as he had already made David Lynch's totemic classic - reach an unprecedented author character.
The start of the marvelous
Hondar Ahoak
(Filmin, title translated as
Bocas de arena),
the first television work of the SUV Koldo Almandoz, with that very direct nod to Stanley Kubrick - a sequence shot that imitates Jack Torrance's arrival at the Overlook in
El Radiance
- is, in that sense, quite a declaration of intent.
We are facing a
noir
, and a
Basque noir
, and not just any one.
What we are going to see is going to try to escape the dictatorship of the plot, it is going to focus on creating a world in which something has happened.
The commitment to a dramatic photography and the use of cinematographic references –something similar to what happens in the chapters directed by M. Night Shyamalan for
Servant
, so different from the sometimes merely functional, not pictorial, television shot–, raises, from the first moment, the magnetism of a series that is nourished, above all, by silences.
Of silences and repetitions, which in the form are sometimes repeated shots - like vignettes from a comic - and which intensify the idea of no way out, of life in the small coastal town where the action takes place, and in which every day it seems the same repeated.
And of course, the work of the actors.
Specifically, the work of Nagore Aranburu, in the role of Inspector Nerea García and Eneko Sagardoy, in the case
of the
Ertzaintza
of the people -
a claustrophobic picturesquely Ondarrua that helps
out with research.
Actually, the one who has come to lend a hand is her.
The master of a fishing boat, a certain Josu, has disappeared and they are not able to find him in the town.
In reality, no one seems to be looking for him, not even his wife.
Nobody cares too much that he doesn't show up.
They take for granted that it has simply disappeared - and
disappearing
is a key concept in the series -, as it has done before, and that it will return.
But then a corpse appears.
Not Josu's but someone who had to do with him.
And little by little, things get complicated, and the entire town seems to begin to close in around Nerea, which, here and there, runs into clues, which are sometimes lonely Senegalese fishermen, or knowing glances at the spit.
What sustains it all is her extremely powerful character as a sullen, and mysterious, outsider.
It is the naturalness of his interpretation, and each aesthetic decision, that makes
Hondar Ahoak
unique.
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