An expatriate is someone who lives outside their homeland, but in this Amazon Prime series it is also
someone who lives outside that personal state that is peace
.
The feeling of being a foreigner when misfortune overtakes us
.
Expats
(
Expats
, based on the 2016 novel by Janice YK Lee) offers us the intimate diary of several duels that occurred in Hong Kong.
The camera manages to reflect the fascinating (and sometimes suffocating) atmosphere of that city-state with more tourists than inhabitants.
That hypnotic island with luxury hotels, impossible skyscrapers and a desperate night market welcomes Margaret (Nicole Kidman) to make the drama explode
.
In two timelines, before and after the misfortune
, we see this uncomfortable Western protagonist, trying to adapt to the new territory and the state of discomfort triggered by the fatality.
She left New York with her three children to accompany her husband Clarke (Brian Tee), transferred by her company.
We would think that they have everything, from family love to enormous luxury, but
in the present they are missing something key: one of her children.
In the first minutes there is a party, a 50th birthday with which the couple tries to face the social gaze despite a disappearance.
"We're just trying to create a sense of normality," she explains.
We will not reveal what happened, but the absent child, the minor, is
the trigger to delve into the irreparable
and
in
those other victims, those who generated evil without wishing it and somehow become dead in life
.
Adding to Margaret's sadness is that of two other women linked to her life, Hilary (Sarayu Rao), who survives in a marriage that is disintegrating, and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a university student who was never able to be the woman again. herself after the fateful night involving Margaret.
A dark narrative and an eye that accompanies that darkness that its characters go through.
"The stories focus on the victim, those responsible for the tragedy are never mentioned," a voice-over introduces us, presenting cases such as that of a child who hurts his brother's vertebra and leaves him paralyzed.
"There is not a single moment that I do not think of you after I destroyed your life," reinforces that voice to tell us that we will see the perspective of someone who eternally suffers from guilt.
About two families and their respective employees in bed, the fiction directed by the Chinese Lulu Wang also takes us through secondary characters who in a chain change the lives of the main ones.
Anguish makes no distinction between nationalities or social classes.
Kidman as a distraught and disoriented mother.
Compassion, forgiveness, survivor's remorse, uprooting, privileged strata, not being able to put a name to the loss of a child, the fateful distractions that full attention on the cell phone causes today... For all these topics we walks
Expats
, a project that
unleashed the ire of many at the beginning of filming, in 2021.
In the midst of the protocol measures due to the pandemic,
Kidman
(executive producer)
those days achieved an exemption from the mandatory quarantine on her work trip to Hong Kong
.
The story that did not sit well with a certain political sector, because it also portrays the protests in Hong Kong in 2014 ("the revolution or the umbrella movement", which demanded the withdrawal of the electoral reform of Congress)
stands out for the great performances
.
Despite the slow narrative,
Expatriates
is worth it because it is not only a map of the fallen, but of
those who are dragged by that fall, those who punish themselves for life trying to answer what made them be there at the least indicated moment.
to accidentally trigger fear.
Kidman, a disappearance and a lurking guilt.
File
Rating:
Good.
Genre:
Drama.
Director:
Lulu Wang.
Cast:
Nicole Kidman, Brian Tee, Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo.
Broadcast: Amazon Prime.