Sugar: Colin Farrell majestic in private film buff (review)
A postmodern private detective series which relies above all on the extraordinary performance of Colin Farrell.
“Everything was fuzzy and raw and biblical,” Pynchon writes of LA somewhere in Inherent Vice. This is a good way to summarize this new post series… Inherent Vice. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, Sugar follows the adventures of a detective hired by a Hollywood mogul to find his granddaughter. Along the way, he will encounter corrupt directors, fallen icons, and all the underworld of LA as battered as he is. An enigmatic puzzle that would pay tribute to both Altman and Cassavetes and function like a detuned Haiku, this gleaming show (let's admit it, sometimes bordering on chic) follows each other for two essential reasons. First the movie fixations.
John Sugar is a movie freak. On his coffee table are the Cahiers du cinéma (where did his premiere go?). Cinema buff, but of the serious kind. And, like in the series Dream on, this obsession will contaminate the story. Regularly extracts from film noir films which inhabit his thoughts streak the screen. Kirk Douglas distributes bread, Bogart answers the phone or Widmark sits at the bar… It's a bit easy, we flirt on the edge of kitsch, but the result is a good addition to this series, which is as stylish as it is vintage.
Stylish: the word seems to have been invented for Colin Farrell who has never been more attractive and magnetic. Sharp as ever. The former Dublin countryboy has been through all the stages – promising young debutant, drunken wreck and oversized actor. He knew how to climb the slope to arrive at this role visibly cut out for him. This private philosopher character, so cool on the outside but so broken on the inside, allows him to be completely resurrected. Half Bogart (for existential detachment) half Cassavetes (for the supreme dandyism of Johnny Staccato), he is mind-blowing, and seems to have come straight from the fifties to clean up contemporary Los Angeles.
The character study is held; the undertows of traumatic memories shake; the death impulses that inhabit him keep him in suspense; and his class and his remorse allow him to move the series forward between suavity and melancholy, between renunciation and hope. Don't get too hung up on the plot (non-existent and resolved in a very disappointing way), instead start Sugar as the backdrop to a rainy and melancholy weekend. It's fantastic.
Sugar created by Mark Protosevitch and directed by Fernando Meirelles is available on Apple TV+ (and Canal+ in France)
