“O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”
These lyrics have been going around my head ever since I finished
the latest available episode of Money
Heist on Netflix last night
(and immediately started the making of documentary). Dear readers, abandon the sourdough yeast you’ve
been nurturing and for god’s sake stop sharing your top 10 albums on Facebook,
for I’m about to school you in the world of the planet’s most popular Netflix
boxset.
It’s a damning yet fair indictment of English-speaking
people’s intelligence (please see evidence: Trump and Johnson as leaders of
nations) that the name of this programme in our mother tongue is the most basic
example of labelling ever known to mankind.
Yes, this programme is about a heist, and yes, money is stolen in that
heist. It is a money heist. For some reason, whoever translated the
Spanish title only had thirty seconds spare to think of the new name. It would be like taking a beloved comedy such
as Friends and entitling it Relationship
Sitcom or renaming Tiger King as
Outrageous Large Cat Documentary. As you
would expect, the original Spanish moniker has more poetry and art to it: La
Casa De Papel. I spent most of the first
series thinking this meant the house of the pope. However, no crusty old white man telling
millions how to live their lives appeared and I remembered that papel actually
means paper, so we have the house of paper – a synonym for the Royal Mint where
the first two seasons play out.
That’s the title covered, and a bit of its content, but what
I’m sure you’re all dying to know is why did I start watching it? I have a vague memory of, at some juncture
before we got locked down, Netflix sharing data on their most watched
programming. Of course, as expected, Stranger Things and Sex Education appeared as worthy leaders of the
pack. But, top of the pops was Money
Heist. Something about Dalí masks and
red boiler suits. “Don’t worry,”
everyone said, “that’s just a show that’s big in South America.” For some reason, the accolade of being number
one had to be dismissed. But then I got
far too into Elite and, on the advice of
pals with more open-minded approaches to finding good TV, selected Money Heist
as my next boxset.
As a touch of expectedly brutal honesty, I don’t mind
admitting that I didn’t feel grabbed by the show straightaway. Sure, the set up was sexy, the stylisation
was classy and the Spanish language with subtitles a great way of keeping my
focus (do not watch this with English-language dubbing – if eyesight problems preclude
you from tolerating subtitles, we all know there’s a Durham castle you can
drive to if you wish to assess your ophthalmological abilities), but for some
reason I didn’t really care about the characters. I felt another The Boys coming on. But, by the seventh installment I had
connected. Since then, it has been a
whirlwind of affection between me and the atracadores.
I’m struggling to put my finger on the exact reasons, but I’m
not alone in my appreciation. A modest
feature in Spanish TV schedules, La Casa De Papel slipped into Netflix’s
international back catalogue and nobody thought any more of it. That is, until the actors’ social media
accounts started to swell with thousands of new followers. Word of mouth generated buzz that compounded
itself over and over until Netflix greenlit further installments which
themselves were hampered by huge numbers of fans crashing the shoots.
At its heart, we have la banda – the select group of
diversely skilled ne’er-do-wells assembled by the enigmatic Profesor. They do the dirty work that brings to life
his masterminded plans, taking on a robbery of such far-fetched ambitions that
your only option is to go with it: taking over the Spanish Royal Mint and
printing their own stash of billions of euros.
The action plays out in multiple timebands, with scenes from the
Profesor’s robbery boot camp foreshadowing events that transpire explosively in
the mint itself. You root for the
robbers, but also for the hostages inside and the police outside trying to
regain control of the situation. Some
things go to plan, while others require a fair bit of thinking on the
spot. But the tension almost never lets
up. Someone once asked if it’s like Prison Break, with a new hurdle to overcome in
each episode, but it feels more sophisticated than that (and the subsequent
series don’t get exponentially worse).
Let’s call it Stockholm Syndrome. Suddenly, Denver’s staccato laugh goes from
being annoying to something that fills you with joy each time you hear it. Nairobi’s constant shouting stops irritating
you and you come to love everything about her.
Even Helsinki goes from being a background bit of hired muscle to a key
player. Nevertheless, Arturito is a
prick the whole time. These beloved
characters’ development is deftly woven through a plot that thinks of pretty
much everything, resulting in a compelling piece of drama that, even with it’s
gun gratuity, shootout porn and slap-you-in-the-face silliness, is everything
people are looking for in a TV show. The
fact that this achievement is replicated across multiple heists is staggering.
And now it’s a social movement. Like the Handmaid’s
Tale outfit, Money Heist jumpsuits have characterised protests for equality
and better prospects throughout the world.
The gang, even the morally dubious ones like Berlin and Palermo, are
fighting the system, and the show plays on their exploitation of PR to bring
the Spanish population on side. Money Heist
resonates, and without it, I am now bereft.
I’ll miss the soundtrack, I’ll miss the cast (even though a load of them
are in Elite anyway), I’ll miss the
sentiment. I’ll gladly be held hostage by
the wait for another series, but till then, those same lyrics (bizarrely in Italian,
rather than Spanish) will be going around my head.
“O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”
