Netflix is facing trouble ahead as more major content platforms launch their own streaming services. At the moment, however, one of the cool things it offers to subscribers is movie and TV content from overseas, particularly in the “thriller” genre, which is often far more creative and inventive than the conventional Hollywood product.
An example is The Writer (original name Al-Kateb) produced by Eagle Films of Lebanon. “When accused of a murder eerily parallel to a plot in his novel, a best-selling crime writer must navigate a web of hidden enemies,” the Netfix summary explains about the series which is in Arabic (with occasional English dialogue) with English subtitles.
If you’re looking for some Labor Day weekend viewing, should the weather prove uncooperative, catch a few episodes of The Writer and see if it clicks with you.
Some Spoilers Follow
There are several other plot threads that go beyond the initial murder accusation, one of which anyone in the writing profession can appreciate and maybe even anticipate. Like Disappearance (Ekhtefa), The Writer also involves a missing manuscript that inexplicably is hand-written.
Netflix doesn’t release individual ratings. It’s probably fair to assume that it’s unlikely that many in the attention-span-challenged American audience would hang in there for the entire 30-episode run of The Writer.
Each episode is only about 40 minutes, though, but there are way too many of them for binging. By reasonably watching only an episode or two at a time, here and there, remembering all the characters and their relationships to each other poses a challenge.
With that acknowledgement, The Writer is nonetheless very entertaining, and can get you hooked, especially with all the interesting characters scheming and scamming to advance their own agendas. Against that backdrop, it’s difficult (and that’s a good thing) to guess the identity of the killer until a viewer gets deep into the series.
Bassel Khayyat portrays novelist Younes Gibran (or Younis Jubran or variations on that) and stunning actresses Daniella Rahme, Reem Khory, and Nada Abu Farhat star as Gibran’s lawyer, ex-lover, and ex-wife, respectively. Other members of the ensemble cast also deliver equally fine performances. Khayyat and Rahme stared together in Tango (2018), which is also available on Netflix.
The brother-and-sister team of Rami Hanna (director) and Rim Hanna (writer) created the intricate, creative series. Given the enormous effort that it obviously took to bring the narrative to the screen, one can only say “Bravo,” as the scenery-chewing Gibran character is fond of declaring.
A Qualified Recommendation
That said, The Writer is a mystery yarn as well as at times a tedious, soap-opera-ish talk fest, with characters spending a lot of time chatting on their cell phones, often while driving. In fact, as a slice of international modern life, it depicts one character freaking out upon losing that character’s smartphone after a car accident.
As with may of these suspense yarns, some aspects of the plot are simply unbelievable. Your mileage may vary on that assessment.
Khayyat’s character is a commanding, charismatic presence throughout. Perhaps the over-the-top, 0-60 performance as the sometimes smarmy celebrity detective-story writer is what the director requested. But what was up with the moustache? Sometimes the Gibran character was going with the Rollie Fingers look and at other times not. Was there some subliminal messaging in the different grooming options?
The most ingenious sequence in The Writer is a Agatha Christie-Murder on the Orient Express-style dream sequence that follows-up earlier sequences.. In the scene, the suspects dressed in 1930s-style garb all gather in a railway car and Gibran and his Hercule Poirot-like protagonist from his novels solve the case and reveal the murderer. The subsequent big, real-time reveal in The Writer confirming the dream sequence is, however, somewhat drawn out.
The Writer contains some comedy, such as the interaction between the slippery book publisher and the anything-for-a-buck blogger.
A Few Additional Observations
The narrative certainly could have been tighter (again, 30 episodes).
Most of the action (and by action, that pretty much means talking) occurs in several upscale areas, yet no one has or thinks to install security cameras outside their residences.
As compared to the U.S., Lebanon (if that’s where The Writer takes place) seems to have unique procedures for recording, or not recording, deeds or other indicia of title on the land records. Eviction procedures also seem lot more pre-emptory than in the U.S.
Also some characters seem to disappear. The Writer would have benefited, for example, from a scene wrapping up the involvement of the retired army colonel functioning as a private investigator and the police official who gets a lot of screen time conducting interrogations.
Since Arabic is said to be a phonetic language, and because of variations in transliteration, the names of the characters are often spelled differently in the subtitles throughout the episodes. Perhaps there was a team rather than one person in charge of the subtitles.
Also, dialogue subtitles can differ as well. For example, in one scene, an actor refers to someone else as a hypocrite. In a flashback to the same scene, the subtitle reads “two-faced.” In another scene that is also flashed back, “peace” and “calm” are used interchangeably in the same line of dialogue. In the subtitles, the police inspector is sometimes addressed as captain, lieutenant, or detective.
Unless you’re involved in the nit-picky writing/editing world, you probably won’t notice any of these nuances.
Although its length and excessive, repetitive conversations about personal problems might be issues, don’t write off The Writer. There are no reviews posted at Rotten Tomatoes at the present time, but check back for updates in the event any emerge.
The Village People
Requiring far less of a commitment for your Labor Day weekend entertainment is The Chalet, a six-episode potboiler from France. A group of people visiting a remote village find themselves cut off from the outside world when a rockslide destroys the only bridge in and out. Very bad things start happening from there. There is, of course, no cell service.
The Chalet goes back forth between a contemporary timeline and one 20 years earlier (that involves a writer as a central figure ), and some characters appear in both. It is, however, rather confusing through the first couple of episodes who’s who and their relationships with each other. The showrunners could have done a much better job in defining all the relevant connections for the audience. The genius of The Chalet is that it is virtually a certainty that no one in the Netflix audience can foresee the original incident that drives the narrative.
[Featured Image credit: Lukas Bieri/Pixabay]