Nicole Kidman leads a group of out-of-touch Americans: NPR

Nicole Kidman has done many different things in film: she has been a slutty schemer in Malicea young Irish immigrant with a strong character in Farshe was even Virginia Woolf in The hours. But on television she specializes in rich, tormented women. Haunted by a nightmare marriage Big little liestormented by the possibility that her husband is a murderer in The ruinand now haunted by a tragedy in expatriatesthe striking Amazon series adapted from Janice YK Lee’s 2016 novel The expatriatesabout three American women who are not from Hong Kong, but live there.

Kidman plays Margaret, a landscape architect. When we meet her, Margaret seems confused, barely engaged with her son and her daughter, or with her husband, Clarke (Brian Tee). Clarke’s job is the reason the family came from New York to Hong Kong, and at the beginning of the series, he secretly seeks solace in a church because something bad has happened. When an innocent question about a boy named “Gus” causes Margaret to flee a room, the nature of that bad something begins to emerge.

Hilary (Sarayu Blue) lives in the same posh building as Margaret, and it’s clear that they have been friends, although there is now tension between them. Margaret has hurt Hilary in some way, and Hilary finds it difficult to reconcile. Hilary and her husband, David (Jack Huston), have been trying to have a baby on the sidelines of her busy professional life and questionable reliability. Their marriage is in trouble, both in ways Hilary knows and in ways she doesn’t yet.

Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) is a young woman who works in a catering service and who, not infrequently, finds herself explaining to the people she meets that she is not local, that she is not Korean, but Korean-American, and who does not speak Cantonese. She provides a voiceover prologue to the series that makes it clear that she feels very guilty about something and that she is having trouble getting over it.

Production notes (sour)

At this point, it’s worth taking a moment to look at the long and sometimes stormy history of this production. The expatriates was published in 2016, and News emerged that Nicole Kidman’s production company had acquired the rights. in early 2017, just before the premiere of Big little lies on HBO. The last important piece of expatriates The puzzle was solved at the end of December 2019, when Lulu Wang, a few months after the premiere of her film The farewelljoined to direct, write and produce “multiple episodes.”

During filming in 2021, Kidman and several crew members obtained an exemption that allowed them to avoid the COVID quarantine rules that applied to everyone else upon arriving in Hong Kong. As The New York Times reported at the time, There was anger not only among the city’s residents, but also in its legislature.. It was apparently a bitter pill to swallow that this production about rich outsiders who paid little attention to the lives of ordinary people in Hong Kong was blessed with regulations intended to protect those same ordinary people.

Perhaps most importantly, it was being filmed and broadcast is taking place at a dangerous and painful time in Hong Kong’s history. (It’s a huge story that defies a quick summary, but a recent update came from NPR’s Emily Feng in December. The headline: “Beijing Tightens Its Political Control Over Hong Kong.”) interview with The Hollywood ReporterWang spoke about the fact that the show “interrogates privilege” and described how the show was filmed during the pandemic. However, she didn’t say much about filming and broadcasting a show primarily about oblivious rich people when this is the political backdrop.

Of course, given previous reports about how censorship has affected Amazon’s content decisions in Indiagrowing censorship laws in Hong Kong, and China’s treatment of underprivileged speech and groups (again, here’s Emily Feng), it’s hard to believe that Wang and the rest of the writers had anything like a free hand in dealing with politics while filming in Hong Kong. And no one seems willing to reveal what the limitations might have been.

If you can’t say anything important, shouldn’t you say anything at all?

What there is of an effort to address the tense politics of contemporary Hong Kong appears in the fifth episode, “Central.” A double-length installment, it shifts the focus to a set of characters we’ve never or rarely spent time with before: a pair of Hong Kong students, a rich Hong Kong woman who’s trying to find a new “helper” For your home. and the two “helpers” who work for Margaret and Hilary’s families. Essie (Ruby Ruiz) and Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla) are Filipinos, so they are also far from home, but their circumstances are very different from those faced by Margaret and Hilary. Over the course of a long night that includes a power outage, the protests escalate… and then quietly subside. Someone is detained and it is worrying, but they are unharmed.

Maybe it’s better than nothing. expatriates recognizes the existence of the conflict in Hong Kong, even if it does very non-specifically, focusing on the broader notion that there are protests and there are disruptions, rather than saying much about what the protests are about. (Once again, it’s hard not to wonder whether a rather dispassionate presentation of the protests as a historical fact without details was a free choice.) But this episode feels attached to the series like a rabbit’s foot to a keychain, more so because of the blessings it represents. It is supposed to bring that by its function. So maybe it’s not better than nothing. Perhaps it would have made more sense to double down on the degree to which Hilary and Margaret, in particular, are ignoring the city beneath their feet.

Some of the initial publicity surrounding this series suggested that it was satire. The book may be a satire, but this series is not a satire. Margaret and Hilary are selfish, and the existence of the expats we meet involves them in a variety of destructive systems, as they throw parties and only talk to each other, enjoying the parts of life in Hong Kong that are pleasurable and avoiding the parts that are pleasant. No. But above all, Hilary and Margaret are presented as understanding, like our protagonists, guilty of excess but not very guilty of their circumstances, very similar to the women of Big little lies. Kidman’s gift for portraying the pain that Margaret tries to bury under a layer of ice is not entirely ingenious; It is her pain that dominates.

The series’ writing can’t seem to lower its pH and satirize these women, or even set aside any claims they may have about victimhood. Margaret’s passing interest in news about the crackdown on protests is unpleasant, but unrelated to her story; It’s just a defect here, like a bad temper. In individual moments, our three women, at least Hilary and Margaret, may come across as callous, but that doesn’t make the series an incisive critique of them. Sour milk doesn’t lampoon the dairy industry just because it tastes bad.

Mercy is a different story. Mercy is interesting, because while she is also an expat, she is quite a different guy. Yoo imbues her with a complex, guilt-ridden believability, turning her into a seemingly self-confident young woman with a thick skin who limps to repair it after something hurts her. It’s the strongest performance in the series and the one that holds up best under the pressure of the show’s uncertain situation.

Marriage, privilege, redux?

The most disconcerting thing about expatriates It’s that their story has almost nothing to do with the fact that these women are expatriates. You could pack up this series and fly it to Manhattan, tell the same central stories about these three women (Margaret’s loss, Mercy’s guilt, Hilary’s marriage) and change… almost nothing. In fact, you could send it to Monterey to be the third season of Big little liesand it would have a lot in common with the other seasons (tragedy, guilt, marriage).

Perhaps in an effort to avoid saying bad things about expats or Hong Kong, expatriates He ends up not saying anything about those things at all. The insularity of a woman living abroad and not speaking the local language is a perhaps ironic mirror of the insularity of a story that doesn’t pay much attention to its setting other than as a setting.

There was probably a different vision for this program at some point. A vision of it as glamorous, beautiful and darkly funny (darkly funny as The farewell era), which makes wealthy people who are expats or even just tourists squirm in recognition. But along the way, it became something much less interesting than that: a melodrama of rich and beautiful people. Furthermore, it is a project that invites, from its title, to be disconcerted by its indifference towards life in Hong Kong. It’s like showing up at a billionaire’s house and taking 100 photos of the koi pond from every angle, while the house burns down behind you. There’s nothing wrong with the photos you’ve taken, but it feels like you could have captured something much more worthy of your attention just by turning your head.