In Hollywood there is a tendency to exploit any intellectual property that the audience can recognize. It is a resource that we criticize for being active and passive due to the lack of confidence in the public when it comes to telling new stories. But, if someone covers Inseparables (Dead Ringers) by David Cronenberg, the film with Jeremy Irons and which adapted a novel by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, the decision cannot be interpreted from a commercial perspective. Let's face it: it's not a claim for an overwhelming part of the public. And, if someone chooses to take a look at the proposal written by Alice Birch and released on Amazon Prime Video at the end of April, they may enjoy like a pig who, after living a lifetime in the middle of a farm with artificial light, finally he goes outdoors and feels the sunlight on his skin as he wallows in a puddle of mud.
Birch, who took on the project after writing in series like Succession and Normal People, changes the sex of the twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle that Jeremy Irons played in 1988 and who now have the face of Rachel Weisz. Elliot and Beverly Mantle are Manhattan's go-to gynecologists. Elliot is self-assured, possibly a functional psychopath, and is excited by the idea of experimenting on embryos in the laboratory, especially if it means challenging the pre-established norms of the medical community.
Beverly, on the other hand, has a more human quality as a professional and is convinced that together they can open a health center for women that treats the bodies of patients with the respect they deserve, as accustomed as they have been to being ignored by doctors. or, for example, suffering obstetric violence in conventional hospitals. This leads them to come into contact with Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle), a millionaire who made her fortune from the opioids marketed by her family (in other words, as if she were a Sackler) and who contributes to stressing the dependency relationship between Elliott and Beverly.
Alice Birch's pen, aware that she wants to create a psychological thriller with a disturbing atmosphere, is as precise as it is sharp. She does not give the viewer any respite while she is offered a game of identities between the sisters, who have a relationship that borders on incest on an emotional level. Each scene poses ethical challenges, casts doubt on the intentions of the characters, brings to the table the lack of scruples of the characters, interesting debates related to women appear. It may be an obstetric visit with a wealthy woman carrying the pregnant woman of her fifth child, while treating her like an uncomfortable vessel, or a woman asking if it would be possible to transplant tissue from a young donor's uterus to delay menopause and be fertile and appear youthful in old age.
Birch's optics are interesting. In her obsession with feminizing history, with turning women's bodies into something more than surgery meat for graduate men, she turns them into victims and also oppressors after passing them through a class filter. She does not choose to create a moral dichotomy between femininity and masculinity, but instead introduces variables such as money, power and ambition to give complexity to the discourse. This does not invalidate the explicit criticism of the lack of tact and consideration with female patients for the simple fact that they face different health challenges than men. But Birch, like Cronenberg, is not here to be complacent, to make things easy for the viewer, to propose an optimistic story.
Cronenberg's meat mentality, in fact, is present in this version both in the way of showing the births, of showing the incisions, and of challenging the viewer when it comes to putting foal meat on the table at one of the most important dinners. disturbing that have ever been seen on television. This sick quality is omnipresent. He walks through the red locker room of the clinic, heir to the eighties tape. It is in the way of showing the Mantles' luxury apartment, which conveys the cold beauty of the Mantles and that inner emptiness that they try to fill with impossible expectations of each other. He is in the helllight of the clinic. They are the secondary characters who barely need two sentences to expose themselves as abominable beings.
It is the corrosive sense of humor, especially exploited from Elliot, that allows a smile to appear on the lips of a spectator who is always afraid of the next scene, of the moment in which absolutely everything can become unbreathable. It is Rachel Weisz evoking intelligence, insecurity, madness, evil, naivety, weakness, from two opposite characters, developed from nuance and without the need to overact (because that is her waste of talent in this series). . It is, excuse the comparisons, the most Hannibal series since Hannibal, which was an aesthetic, discursive and perverse work.
Seeing Inseparable implies savoring it. It is not made for the marathon but for the leisurely feast. Of course, always with a certain amount of caution: that fear of finding a scene difficult to process, to digest, because the streaming audiovisual has become so complacent that it hardly dares to provoke the viewer. How stimulating and how wonderful, right?
