The first time Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) was in Los Angeles, they asked him for money on the street. When he said that he did not have cash, that stranger told him: “I curse you.” Fielder was so disturbed by those words that he went to an ATM, took out money, looked for the curser and asked him to remove the curse. “What if you hadn't found that person?” asked Benny Safdie (Diamonds in the Rough).
He was interested in that hypothesis: then any of Fielder's misfortunes could have been attributed to that street curse. From that informal conversation between two renowned screenwriters and directors came The Curse, a satire that could be defined as a comedy of the execrables and that features Emma Stone, Oscar winner for La La Land, always in search of artistic stimuli that They go beyond the ambition of commercial success.
In the fiction released by SkyShowtime, Stone and Fielder are Whitney and Asher Siegel, newlyweds who try to sell a home renovation reality show presented by themselves and produced by Dougie, an unscrupulous man played by Safdie. They look for residents of the town of Española and transform both their homes and their lives, placing the needs of that humble community in New Mexico at the center. This at least is what they say.
In reality, the format is the antithesis of activism: Whitney is a fraud of an architect obsessed with building overly expensive reflective houses (which, to make matters worse, copied from another architect) and they need to gentrify that area, where they have invested, so as not to go bankrupt. with the designs. And, in the middle of taping, a girl curses at Asher when he begs her for a hundred dollars that she had given him to look good on the show.
In his desire to study human behavior and portray himself as a person with no social skills, Fielder offers with Safdie an acidic comedy disconnected from fun and jokes: the creative commitment involves chaining despicable, hypocritical, disturbing or uncomfortable situations from unfriendly characters that test the viewer.
Those responsible may be too delighted with the eccentric image they project in front of the cameras, but Stone stands out with the forced smiles of Whitney, a privileged, spoiled and insecure woman, desperate for the approval of third parties and fed up with a husband she considers inferior.
They parody reality television, criticize the gentrification that destroys entire communities and above all denounce the common instrumentalization of social causes by those who disguise personal ambition as activism, and structure their speech meticulously, seeking the challenge, making sure not to construct jokes but rather to pursue ridicule, shame, ridicule and a discomfort that forces the viewer to process what they are seeing.
Of course, The curse also raises a question: does an exercise of these characteristics have its best ally on television, especially when those responsible produce hour-long episodes?
