EActually, “The Regime” could only succeed. Series specialist Will Tracy (“Succession”), playwright and Pulitzer finalist Sarah DeLappe and Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart wrote the script, and Stephen Frears (“Dangerous Liaisons,” “High Fidelity”) is directing. Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts (“Kursk,” “Red Sparrow”) play the leading roles, with Hugh Grant, Martha Plimpton and Andrea Riseborough appearing in supporting roles. The music comes from Alexandre Desplat (“Grand Budapest Hotel”, “The Shape of Water”), the camera is directed by Alwin Küchler (“Divergent”, “Hanna”, “The Mauritanian”). The proven production machinery of the pay channel HBO produced the series. A sure shot. Actually.
It is therefore not easy to explain why “The Regime” was a complete failure – an endless, tough, unfunny attempt at a joke, an aesthetic and narrative debacle, six hours of lost life. Maybe we should start with the look of the series, its settings, its design. “The Regime” was shot in Vienna and in the studio, the interior views of the palace from which Elena Vernham (Winslet) rules a small Central Eastern European state as the all-powerful president was shot in the Liechtenstein Palace there, the exterior facades are a mixture of Schönbrunn and Ceaușescu's Bucharest swanky box in front of an anonymous Alpine backdrop.
So baroque and pseudo-baroque. Except that the two never really come together, the exterior looks like it was cobbled together from a digital wooden construction kit (which it is), while the interior hangs around in its heavy splendor as if ordered and not picked up. A scene without a show. At one point you see a valuable porcelain service passing through a security gate. This is actually a punchline. It lasts five seconds.
The same gap exists in the story. At the beginning you see the trigger-happy policeman Zubak (Schoenaerts) being brought to Mrs. Vernham in the prison car; He becomes her new bodyguard and bearer of the humidity measuring device, which is supposed to protect the regent from fungal spores in the palace air. Soon he's having wet dreams about her as she struggles with allergies and corrupt ministers. When she finally puts her trust in him, he heals her with mustard compresses, black radish puree and potato steam from a hundred cooking pots.
Hugh Grant as a former ruler behind bars
In addition, the rustic Zubak also has a few political ideas, all of which boil down to Stalinist-style grassroots socialism: farmer's land in farmer's hands, socialization of industry, potatoes for everyone. She implements it, and her oligarch camarilla goes along half-heartedly, while her husband, who is reading “The Flowers of Evil” in bed, weighs his head worryingly; but then, suddenly, she changes her mind and Zubak goes behind bars. There he meets the former Grand Chancellor, who has also fallen from grace, a man named Keplinger – and lo and behold, it is Hugh Grant, who looks like a British nuclear researcher who has ended up in a Monty Python version of Slovakia.
A grotesque. Or a tragedy? The director Frears doesn't know. That's why he stages the story sometimes as an over-the-top comedy, sometimes as a dark post-royal Shakespearean drama, alternating every five minutes. In this way, both the humor and the seriousness fall flat: one gets angry, the other gets flat. When the American Secretary of State (Plimpton) comes to visit, we are supposed to be amused by her fear of Zubak's bulldog face and pitied about the exploitation of the workers during Elena Vernham's visit to a beet sugar factory, but every time all we see is a messed up scenic experimental setup that comes through Desplat's score is sometimes comical, sometimes pathetic, without coming to life.
At some point, after various humidity measurements, bouts of heat, mustard compresses, oligarch parties, military actions, land reform and civil war, this serial stillbirth is over and one asks oneself how what happened here could have happened. According to Billy Wilder, to make a film you need three things: a good script, a good script and a good script. However, the six episodes of “Regime” not only needed a better template, but also someone who could distinguish a bad from a good script. That was obviously missing despite Frears, Winslet, Desplat and HBO. “A huge effort, disgraceful! is wasted.” Shakespeare? Goethe.
From Tuesday on Sky TV.
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