Director and screenwriter in his short but magnificent filmography Lulu Wang showed special interest people who don’t fit in wellWhether on a cultural or social level. With ‘Farewell’ movie received applause He wondered whether someone like him, who was born in China but moved to the United States with his family when he was 6, could consider himself an American; those who have the right to consider themselves an undisputed part of that country.
Returns in series format after five years ‘Expatriates’ (Prime Video, Friday, 26th; double-part premiere), An exploration of uprooting and displacement through the intersecting fates of three American women in the troubled Hong Kong of the Umbrella Revolution. dreamed by Janice Y.K. Lee for the 2016 novel Margaret (Nicole Kidman), her neighbor Hilary (Palace Blue) and a slightly confused Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) are very different in both their origins and experiences, but they are also connected by their complex desire to start a new life. Perhaps a time when a certain tragedy that bound them together remains only a distant memory.
What started as a commissioned work (Kidman, who was also a producer, discovered the book, acquired the rights, and knew Wang was the one who knew best how to adapt it) eventually became a completely personal project for its author: exploring its themes and visual language over the course of six and a half hours. It goes a long way; 96-minute episode, the fifth episode focusing on the daily life of Filipino participants People who save the lives of people like Margaret and Hilary every day.
An empathetic expansion
When it came to bringing the original novel to the big screen, Wang was clear that at least a few things had to change. He wanted to get close to the many types of Americans who are the book’s protagonists, but he needed to go further and give prominence to characters from other communities, as in the aforementioned fifth chapter.
“I wanted to do something with this series. broad representation of the diaspora, not only American but also Asian“It’s very much a continuation of ‘Farewell’: we see many different types of Americans, not just one where Nicole appears,” the director explains in a video call with El Periódico de Catalunya of the Prensa Ibérica group. Kidman. And we also see other classes of people, such as city dwellers or migrant workers. “The ideal was to explore the intersection of all these identities.”
On the other hand, he wanted to avoid verbal explanations as much as possible and insist on making use of the more or less privileged tools of his profession, namely cinema rather than literature. “Some structures work very well in a novel but don’t work on the big screen. All the emotional nuances explained by the narrative had to be images. I wanted you to be able to see what people really feel; I didn’t want to do a voiceover explaining everything.. “That was the challenge: How do you show these feelings of dislocation, or the guilt of being the perpetrator, with just images and sounds?”
This is achieved by recovering after ‘Farewell’, for example. cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano, originally from Barcelonaor composer Alex Weston, where it is delivered to the surrounding media passages. In his transition from independent cinema to streaming series, Wang didn’t have to sell his soul: notes of lyricism or emotional fascination are still there. “Amazon was very supportive and believed in my vision,” he says. “‘Why do you always film people from behind?’ “I was expecting to get a note or two like that. But that didn’t happen.”
Too big, too small
No TV series should be watched on a mobile phone, especially a series this good. We can only appreciate it with the biggest screen in the house visual juxtapositions that relativize the drama of the characters: Kidman is reduced to a miniature with the imposing city architecture. “We are small,” Wang recalls: “This is the fundamental dilemma of our existence: being both important and insignificant. Personally, I believe in the butterfly effect, the idea that everything you do will eventually impact the world. But there are also moments when I feel like an ant. This change defines our lives“.