While the main character Charlie Cale (as if born for this role, Natasha Lyonne) lives a generally boring life, she has a unique talent – she always accurately determines other people’s lies. This talent helped him get rich once playing poker, after which the owners of a casino in Las Vegas made him persona non grata. Now he makes a living working as a waitress in a casino and wastes his talent on befriending a colleague, Natalie.
One day, while cleaning the presidential suite, Natalie notices on the screen of an open laptop computer that there is evidence of the guest’s crimes – an influential mob. Natalie considers informing the police but dies suddenly. Not believing his friend’s accidental death, Charlie begins his own investigation while dealing with the boss (beautiful Adrien Brody), who offers him an illegal poker game for good money.
But Charlie’s investigation reveals to him the nasty truth about what’s been circulating all these years, the scam fails and he himself, an amateur investigator, becomes the next victim. Escaping the persecution of the mob, the girl travels across America investigating other crimes she accidentally witnessed.
A frame from the series “Pokerface” (2023)
peacock
“Pokerface” is Rian Johnson’s first writing television project, giving us both parts of the charming detective Knives Out. Prior to that, he had worked as a guest director only a few times – for example, it was Johnson who directed the cult hermetic episode “The Fly” of Breaking Bad.
Even before the release of Pokerface, Johnson jokingly admitted that the experience of working on the series was so interesting to him that he considered taking a break from full yards altogether. While fans awaiting the Knives Out triquel were stunned to watch, the director hastened to reassure everyone: He’s definitely not leaving the big movie yet, but perhaps he’ll linger on air. What’s more, the fight for him was serious – Netflix bought an aesthetic franchise about Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit Blanc, and Peacock snatched a modernized version of Colombo in a format of 10-hour episodes with the first four of them. premiere.
It’s easy to explain the excitement around Johnson – the director and screenwriter managed to reconstruct the usual detective genre by combining Agatha Christie’s heroes with Arthur Conan Doyle-level cleverly twisted puzzles and embellishing it all with subtle and accomplished humor. And we’ve apparently seen it many times, but in the author’s presentation of Johnson, the boring genre took a new breath, played with fresh colors and managed to win the hearts of the audience.
A frame from the series “Pokerface” (2023)
peacock
The characters that fill Johnson’s worlds are charismatic loners with an unexpected mix of weirdness and charm. But it is not only the characters that fill the director’s stories with a special atmosphere – the director himself tries himself as a masterful master of detective stories. It disrupts the usual linear arrangement and subtly distributes clues and clues throughout the plot, and it depends only on the viewer’s attention whether the researcher can solve the mystery before him.
At the same time, the usual detective structure in Pokerface collapses: in each episode, a new crime occurs, which the viewer witnesses together with the criminal. But hero Lyonne (the same underdog no one bets on but who turns out to be more insightful and resourceful than anyone else) must unravel the tangle of secrets and human passions: who, why, and exactly how? And the way Johnson cunningly guides us through the same logical corridors that Charlie wanders turns Pokerface into a brilliant and original project.
All the guns hanging at the beginning of each episode will definitely fire (it is curious that three loaded guns hang at once in the pilot episode in the brody hero’s office – an absolute randomness in Johnson’s world), but who will be able to survive this conflict, but we will find out closer to the finale.
A frame from the series “Pokerface” (2023)
peacock
Based on the first four episodes, it looks like Johnson is just picking up the pace and aiming to develop the series further. Who knows, maybe he’ll even decide to cross the Knives Out and Pokerface universes – and Charlie picks up the needle-dressed Benoit Blanc from somewhere in the desert wilderness.
However, the hero Lyonne, with a recognizable smoky hoarseness, runs into the distance, personifying a living paradox: he needs to hide from the bandits pursuing him, but he himself becomes that instrument of justice, an inevitable meeting. That means meeting with killers is inevitable, but as long as there’s a temporary advantage, you can help put a few bad guys behind bars. Moreover, the investigation here turns from a boring procedure into a real work of art.
Source: Gazeta
Brandon Hall is an author at “Social Bites”. He is a cultural aficionado who writes about the latest news and developments in the world of art, literature, music, and more. With a passion for the arts and a deep understanding of cultural trends, Brandon provides engaging and thought-provoking articles that keep his readers informed and up-to-date on the latest happenings in the cultural world.