Kate Winslet, who won the Emmy for Mare of Easttown, trusts HBO again with The Regime. The political satire, which imagines the chancellor of an authoritarian Central European regime, is written by Will Tracy, who was in the Succession writers' room and created a textbook eat-the-rich with The Menu. With the conjunction of these names and acronyms, it is tempting to assume that we are facing a stimulating or at least appreciable series. However, the experiment is difficult to understand.
The Regime, for the record, is not a conceptually or plot-wise disconcerting project. As Elena Vernham, Winslet plays a president with a tendency toward paranoia, who needs to have someone measure the humidity of the rooms she enters, and who erodes the freedoms of the country that she claims to love and protect. The messages she addresses to the nation, full of emotive terms, help to understand the extent to which she exercises basic populism. And, after becoming infatuated with a violent and unstable soldier (Mattias Schoenarts), the viewer can only deduce what atrocities they can commit together.
Winslet, who celebrates each anniversary of her electoral victory at the state level, goes off-key in a musical number before the country's highest echelons and senior diplomatic officials of foreign powers. The corpse of her father progressively decomposes in a room of the palace where she resides (because, as if she were Marine Le Pen, she is the daughter of the founder of her party who never came to power).
The artistic direction is as controlled as the humidity of the palace with costume choices that, at times, almost lead to drawing parallels with The Handmaid's Tale, only changing the color palette. When Stephen Frears, who directs three of the six episodes, wants to raise the temperature of the dystopian tone of the plot, he twists the camera in what seems like an easy resource. And, which is painful considering the talent of the actress, Winslet clashes head-on with the lack of grace of the lines of dialogue.
There are many fictions that have led the viewer to doubt the idea of the welfare society that was sold from the West, as if the progressive conquest of rights and the consolidation of democracies were unstoppable movements. And, given the rise of populism and the emergence of reactionary parties, there are people like Will Tracy who, with a sly smile, write political plots for us from the extreme and the absurd as a reaction to the present.
But, between stridency, commonplaces and plots that pale in comparison to reality, the result remains a vociferous, pedantic and inconsequential exercise. One could discuss the extent to which these weak and comical social denunciations provoke the exact opposite of their objective: they sterilize and demobilize the public, settling for a joke as a response to political horror.
Furthermore, by confusing cynicism and ridicule with humor, The Regime offers an uncomfortable experience for all the wrong reasons.
