Creators: Doug Miro, Eric Newman, Carlo Bernard and Ingrid Escajeda
Address: Andrés Baiz
Distribution: Sofia Vergara, Alberto Ammann, Alberto Guerra, Martin Rodriguez
Country: United States of America
Duration: 55 minutes approx. (6 episodes)
Year: 2024
Gender: crime drama
Premiere: January 25, 2024 (Netflix)
★★★
Story Griselda Blanco, a Colombian woman of humble origins, has become the leader of a previously male drug trafficking business in a country that is not her own.or more specifically the Miami of the seventies and eighties, remains an object of fascination. Her figure reflects both low and high culture: in 2014, the year the soap opera ‘Black Widow’ (one of her nicknames) began, she appeared as a character in the novel ‘A Brief History of Seven Murders’. It won Marlon James the Booker Prize.
Three years later, British Catherine Zeta-Jones replaced her in the television movie ‘Griselda: Queen of Cocaine’. And now ‘Griselda’ comes from its most reliable leading lady (and producer): Colombian Sofía Vergara, who has been committed to making a project a reality for a decade, she just isn’t going to let it happen. move in your native languagebut also Show off your full dramatic potential She made her mark on television with her role as Gloria from ‘Modern Family’.
At the beginning of the series, we see Griselda move from Medellín to Miami with her three children after an argument with her abusive second husband and mentor in the cocaine business, Alberto Bravo (Alberto Ammann). An old friend, Carmen (Vanessa Ferlito), has a home of her own and a job at a travel agency, which will eventually become the linchpin in an ingenious plan to take over the cocaine market in her adopted city. Griselda brings her old brothel friends (one of them played by singer Karol G) by cargo with their bras. She then uses them as advertising women to attract wealthy white men craving hyperstimulation to the product. So, It puts objectification in the service of a scheme of enrichment that is not immune from racial and class retribution.
The narrative cuts back and forth between the present and the past to show where Blanco finds the energy and anger to move with grace through the principally male underworld and subdue the most dangerous gangsters. Griselda is no hero, but there is an undeniable pleasure in seeing her “beat the toughs,” as they say in the series, while the men demand that she confine herself to being a housewife. In parallel, we see Inspector Hawkins (Juliana Aidén Martinez), who is obsessed with Griselda’s case. Being subjected to misogyny from colleagues who prefer him to limit himself to keeping the coffee hot. The female cop suffers in her life like the drug smuggler woman, in a game of reflexes close to those in Michael Mann’s legendary movie ‘Heat’.
But we can’t actually talk about common heroism here: Sofia Vergara designed this series for its brilliance and its complete subversion of expectations. In the series, he seems to have been transformed on every level, starting with a prosthetic cape that gives him another nose and another chin. A nasal prosthesis can be a bit distracting, as in “The Hours” with Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf or more recently in “Maestro” with Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein. But it’s also no real impediment to appreciating Vergara’s intricate work, which needs to be shown off. fast and vulnerable, scary and loving. Griselda appears as the mother of his three children and also those who work for him. They called her the Godmother.
Vergara is accompanied by drug experts on her adventure: the miniseries was co-created and all episodes are directed by Doug Miro (one of the creators of ‘Narcos’), who co-wrote it with Ingrid Escajeda (“Silo”). Colombian Andrés Baiz is currently responsible for many episodes of the TV series ‘Narcos’ and ‘Narcos: México’. Leaving aside the documentary atmosphere, or more clearly the political approach, Baiz focuses on the intense and close examination of the anti-hero. He mentioned John Cassavetes’ ‘Gloria’ as an influence, but the style may be more reminiscent of Scorsese, especially in the sequence shot that shows us the good organization in Blanco’s house or some out-of-phase images like this. Taken from ‘The Wolf’ of Wall Street. Again, as in Scorsese’s films, despite the initial grandeur, whoever commits a crime eventually pays the price: excesses and moral failings have consequences. It is very difficult to clean the blood from your hands.