The technology of art or how dangerous it is to be fashionable
It's hard to find a person who would breathe more evenly to Soderbergh's work than I do. In the early 90s, one of the main hopes of independent cinema, then the author of stylish and very popular films, now an apologist for the technical revolution in film and television industry. Keeps his nose in the wind, always in the center of the most fashionable and relevant. Nothing bad, I guess. You can't overgrow moss. But there is something opportunistic about it. In other words, I consider Mr. Soderbergh to be more of a smart and sensitive producer than a director. Even in his statement that he finally goes on television, through rather sober calculation. It's all the same where to create. Now the era of TV shows and TV products has begun, and here it is. All life now fits into a smartphone and everything has an app, and here's the tireless Stephen again. They shoot clips (films) on the iPhone, it's like here. He is a producer, director, cameraman, editor, screenwriter, actor, composer. In a word: a Swede, a reaper, and a player on the dud. Not many people know everything. He's doing fine. Is it really a spark of creativity or thanks to modern technology? The answer is obvious. I really appreciate it, Soderbergh doesn't hide it. For him, the art and the results of technological progress, in fact, things are equal and coincident, which was partly demonstrated and indicated directly in the series Mosaic.
Mosaic wasn’t really about the series. It created an app that was only available in North America, and it was all about being able to look at, but rather look at, the story of one murder from different angles, from the perspective of each of the characters. At the same time, you could choose the hero himself, study the documents of the investigation, return to any point of the narrative. Playing interactive investigator. The idea is naturally not new. Let’s remember the Swedish franchise Murder. Soderbergh, on the other hand, took the idea and stuffed it with lots of technical features, making a rattling mix of video and games. It was a great interactive product. Well, that's all, from the smartphone now you can definitely not get out.
Nevertheless, HBO, losing its position under the pressure of NETFLIX, persuaded the director to edit the series for “backward” viewers. Apparently, the director is nostalgic for old cases, because he still agreed.
It was a different product. Preserved, perhaps, only an interactive style of narration and advanced camera work. Otherwise, a rather interesting detective with several scenarios and a number of suspects. Nice. Interesting.
Heroes. The choice of the main character - children's writer Olivia Lake, was predetermined. Aged but still aggressively sexy (I fear only at first glance), Sharon Stone. Only she was considered for the role. At first I thought maybe I should have taken another actress. An actress whose display of the heroine's emotional side would be more subtle and less demonstrative. In short, not as crooked as Stone. Nope. Only Stone was right. He needed a character who was successful but completely helpless inside. Outside, a beautiful but deep old maid. Hence the hysteria and caricature of the heroine. She is a talented writer, but she is not. Or rather, she thinks she is not. How many examples of interesting, worthy people who do not get this, we know. They become victims of worthless characters who, like dogs, feel this weakness. Olivia Lake is sorry. It should be. She's a victim. The rest of the actors coped with their heroes as well. Jennifer Ferrin, an actress previously unknown to me. It acts as the engine of story and investigation. There's some scary magic in her close-ups. Hypnotic beauty. She also acts unexpectedly and a kind of alter ego of the director himself. He loves art, but he sees it as technical perfection.
There's really one "but." Almost all the heroes are not fully revealed. Their lines are hanging. It is as if we are dreaming about ourselves. Some of them are literally looking at themselves. The end of each story is unknown to us. The finale of the entire series is unknown.
Picture. All the fashionable "tricks" are applied. And the unusual dim light, and the effect of the hidden camera, and defocus frames, and very close-up plans. At the same time, the interactive effect is interspersed with quite ordinary television shootings. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's inappropriate. All this did not bother me, although I felt the desire of the director or the cameraman to discourage us and surprise us.
Over. Good product. Technical. Nevertheless, remember the phrase of the heroine N. Mordyukova “you are a good man, but not an eagle”. Just like this. The same goes for Soderbergh. Relevant, fashionable, not stupid, but not a breakthrough. No gut, no revelation. It may be true, of course, that he is just a pioneer in new fields of art, as he claims. I don't think so. As Wilde once said, “There is nothing more dangerous than being fashionable.” Everything that is fashionable goes out of fashion very quickly”. Soderbergh became a hostage of this eternal race. Sometimes it would be better to just stop and say something “from yourself.”
Olivia Lake (Sharon Stone) - a children's writer who once became famous thanks to the book "Whose forest is this?" She lives in the town of Summit, Utah, and reaps the benefits of her past success, running the Mosaic Foundation, a charitable foundation that promotes creativity in children. Almost simultaneously, two men appear in her life. Joel (Garrett Hedlund) is a simple guy, a handyman with a craving for drawing, whom Olivia invites to live and work on her estate. Eric Neil (Fred Weller) is a swindler whose task was to gain Olivia’s trust and convince her to sell the estate to interested people. However, the hapless fraudster suddenly awakened sincere feelings, and now on Olivia’s finger a ring sparkles, and the case moves to the wedding. Until on New Year’s Eve, the writer is not killed – exactly after she quarreled with both at once.
Stephen Soderbergh, who, as you know, left, but did not leave, continues to experiment on screens large and small. Mosaic is an experiment in both form and content. This is primarily an interactive gaming application for smartphones, giving the player the opportunity to conduct an investigation, study all the circumstances of the case and come to conclusions. The HBO released a television version of this story, edited as a six-part mini-series. The word "mosaic" here is not only a reference to the name of the charity Olivia Lake, but also a characteristic of the presentation of the material.
Nonlinear narrative, flashbacks, "unreliable narrator" Soderbergh uses, it seems, all the tools known to mankind concerning the detective genre. At the same time, he does not try to design a perfect detective, but rather plays out the cliches and cliches inherent in the genre (in the third series, for example, a gardener becomes a suspect in all seriousness, but this version quickly falls apart), and somewhere he completely deconstructs it. Even the series starts with a denouement-spoiler: in the opening scene, the police officer (Devin Ratray) indicts the suspect and lists the evidence collected.
The nicest thing about everything that happens on the screen is, of course, the Cinephile jokes (“The Red Room?”). It’s like Fifty Shades of Grey or what? and Soderbergh’s attempts to pretend to be David Lynch. Several times, the camera focuses on some mysterious sign that appears here and there, but this line does not get any development. Mysticism, and only... However, otherwise Summit is not Twin Peaks, there is no excess of different characters here. And this, perhaps, the main weakness of the script: for a good detective, and even assuming the maximum involvement of the viewer, the diversity of the characters would be only a plus. Mosaic, however, delineating from the outset a rather narrow circle of possible suspects, thus limits itself, becoming too much a chamber story, besides not offering any truly inventive plot twists. Soderbergh cheerfully begins the narrative, but too early throws all the cards on the table, not really saving anything for the final. Whether such a winding path of such a fresh finish was worth it - a question that every viewer can decide for himself.
Verdict: not a revolution or a masterpiece, but rather a kind of elegant, curious idleness.
6 out of 10
Watched the first season of Mosaic. Since there will also be a second one, the right wonders whether the story is completed or broken in half-word. This significantly changes the attitude to the series. If in essence (and not bother with the ability to change turns in the Internet format), the first five episodes are a formalistic adherence to the 10 rules of the classic detective Ronald Knox. In fact, these first five episodes of Soderbergh is a classic English detective with a limited time-place, circle of suspects, only one corpse. Multi-time inserts have become a common place - the essence of the matter does not change. The final series with a certain troutle in relation to the sister of the accused is puzzling and here, in half-word, the story ends. I have great respect for the skill of Soderbergh, who, within the framework of his own built constraints, solves a number of formal problems; this strong professionalism does not exclude those considerations that this director can shoot in the spirit of Lynch without technical games. The Red Room, by the way, is in the series, without any quotation marks. The series is completely unemotional, this is also the principled position of the author. Not so that there was “art for art’s sake”, but it was done with a cold nose. Curiously, the second season intrigues me perhaps filling.
A few words about Sharon Stone, who has a good (and not the largest) role. At 60, understandably, due to age-related changes, a well-built, non-asthenic woman is left either to blur (like Elizabeth Taylor, for example) or to dry out - and this is Stone's case. She has the right facial features and looks straight good, without any second chins and so on. Well, there is nothing left of the forms, skin and bones, about which her character ironically reports in front of the mirror. Judging by the shape of the actress, good roles are still waiting for her.
6 out of 10
Mosaic was originally created as an interactive application for a smartphone, where the viewer can follow the development of the plot from several points of view on behalf of different characters, find different keys, roll back and fully immerse themselves in what is happening. But then Steven Soderbergh decided to make a regular linear version for television. So it turned out a six-part mini-series. The interactive application is not available to the Russian viewer and there is no opportunity to appreciate all the charms of the new format (although, such attempts to create a film, where the viewer himself has the right to choose the further development of the plot or on whose behalf to observe what is happening, date back to the 60s).
“Mosaic” is not only the name of the series, but also the name of a charitable foundation run by children’s writer Olivia Lake (Sheron Stone). We have only a couple of episodes to admire her play, after which she mysteriously disappears and the series from an existential crime drama turns into a detective.
The first series are markedly different from the further narrative even in the manner of shooting: too slow in pace frames, playing with color and unusual work of the operator (they, by the way, were made by Soderbergh himself, as well as in a number of his other works) makes us observe covertly the life of Olivia Lake and the men around her. In the future, Soderbergh experimented less with the form of the narrative (some of the characters in the series talk about the same, by the way), but it is clear that the technique of shooting is more important for him than the essence itself. Perhaps it’s not just the director’s fault, it’s the writer’s fault (Ed Solomon). As a result, with well-playing actors, and in principle a good disclosure of the characters of their heroes, they failed to build a strong detective thriller.
6 out of 10
The series “Mosaic” made its first appearance in November 2017 in the form of an innovative presentation by all standards and was presented in the form of an interactive mobile application where the viewer could choose on whose behalf to contemplate everything that is happening. But this is not all, the viewer could also make decisions in this tape, choosing a particular storyline on his device and on a certain algorithm of the choice, depended on the denouement of the epic. The creators thought why computer games can influence the plot of the story, and the series can not and decided to radically rethink the concept of “rail” narrative. As Steven Soderbergh, the film’s director, said, “It’s an example of a branched narrative.” They have always existed, but now new technologies allow you to make this form of presentation much more refined. We spent a lot of time giving the viewer the opportunity to really touch the plot.” When Soderbergh sits in the director’s chair, and HBO is responsible for the creation, the picture simply cannot but please the viewer. In January 2018, a full-screen version of the mobile thriller-detective was released, but this time without the opportunity to take a direct part in this play of greed, lies and intrigue. Now let’s see what came of it...
As is not often the case, the story begins at the very end, not for nothing the slogan of the series reads: "The beginning of her story is the end of her life." The cold body of Olivia Lake (the incredible and legendary Sharon Stone, although in this series more like Robin Wright from “House of Cards”) is found in one of the hotel rooms and all suspicions of murder immediately fall on a young man named Joel Harley (Garrat Hadlund), who directly worked and lived in a small house near the queen of “children’s dreams”. Then the events are transferred to four years ago, where at a prominent reception Olivia meets a pretty and charming bartender Joell, who is also an artist. Noticing the good inclinations of the young man’s illustrations, as well as his sweet face, Lake offers to take the talent under his wing in order to teach the craft and help with the start of the illustrator’s career. In parallel with all this, near Olivia’s estate lives Michael O’Connor, who, due to some circumstances, has his eye on the land where the successful illustrator lives. Having tried all attempts to buy the estate legally, Michael resorts to a cunning scam plan and hires a professional seducer and conqueror of women's hearts Eric Nell (Frad Weller), who, after frowning the lady, should persuade her to sell the estate. To find out who is really responsible for the murder of Olivia Lake, we have 6 episodes, it is a pity that this time without our direct involvement.
A good atmosphere, excellent actors and their play, good camera work (although some episodes of shooting with trembling hands to create a certain effect and is in question), the flowercore is selected in such a manner that even through the screen you feel the snowy cold of the mountains, all the above well characterizes the picture as worthy of the work, and most importantly, there is an original idea of an interactive narrative and an extremely ambiguous storyline that will not give you an answer to the question: “Who killed Olivia Lake.” Expect less and should not be when behind the production of such giants of the industry. Perhaps the only drawback, in my purely personal opinion, is the fact that the heroine Sharon Stone is extremely despondent and trusting towards men. How easy it is to trust a person you know for a few days, given the fact that the young man is extremely well aware of all sorts of corrupt schemes of realtors, and even immediately after showing obvious sympathy for the hero of Garrett Hadlund, this is a clear mistake in the script.
The series can advise all lovers of classic thrillers and detectives, as well as those who are always looking for something new and tired of stamped copies of faceless series, as well as for those who are ready to experience the fruits of interesting innovative solutions in such a stagnant industry. And most importantly, when watching, be sure to pick your "killer favorite" and see if he comes to the finish line winner in this tangled relationship race.