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jamesginortonblog · 6 years

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Spoilers after the break

Alex got busted by fiancé Rebecca and it was the day of reckoning in Mumbai. As the series reached its midway point, here’s all the talking points from McMafia's eventful episode four…

The god of Mumbai is no more

It was Breaking Bad, Bollywood-style. After the tip-off from the mysterious Mexican shipping tycoon Antonio Mendez (Caio Blat) in episode three, ambitious young pretender Dilly Mahmood (a raw, swaggering turn from Nawazuddin Siddiqui) was ready to steal a one-tonne drug shipment from under the nose of reigning Indian godfather Benny Chopra (Atul Kale).

We watched the heroin get slid through pipes to bypass the barbed wire fences along the Pakistan border, then get welded into washing machines for transporting. A dirty business indeed. It’d take more than a boil wash to get those moral stains out.

With the help of a nocturnal raid on Benny’s office, his hapless late-working accountant (coldly shot in the head for his trouble) and terrifyingly talented hacker Jay “Jammy” Chohan (Vishwas Kini), Dilly gleaned all the info he needed to pull off an audacious heist. It was knuckle-gnawingly tense as cargo containers were intercepted and fake security passes checked, but he pulled it off and the fateful Srikkanth Steel container was last seen driving off into the Mumbai night.

I found myself rooting for Dilly, despite his mercurial moods that turned on a rupee – quick to slap (or shoot) those who displeased him. The final scene saw some enterprising young urchins take Dilly to Chopra’s corpse, dumped and undignified on a rubbish tip – presumably executed by silently seething Russian mob boss Vadim Kalyagin (Merab Ninidze) for bungling the operation.

“Who’s god now?” snarled Dilly, respectfully closing the dead man’s eyes – before spitting on his corpse and striding off to seize control of his new criminal empire. It was a changing of the gangland guard.

Kleiman put it on Alex’s conscience

Puppet-master politician Semiyon Kleiman (David Strathairn) ensured it was hedge fund manager Alex Godman (James Norton) who gave the heroin heist the go-ahead. After all, the intel had come from his source, he’d transferred the necessary funds and even found the crucial computer hacker.

This seems to be the manipulative strategy of choice in McMafia world. Kleiman had made Alex responsible for Reznik’s death in Prague two episodes ago and now we saw Dilly do likewise with the unlucky accountant.

When Alex gave the nod – a cryptic “Let me know how it goes” down the phone – he crossed a line. He wasn’t just sitting behind a keyboard anymore. His soft banker’s hands had blood on them and it wouldn’t come off in the shower – even if that scene did fulfil the Norton flesh quota for this episode.

Heroic hackers ran the show

How very 21st century. It was two computer hackers who became the key cogs in the global crime machine.

When Godman Capital’s “heavy metal IT guy” Tobe Miller (Joshua James) was mentioned in passing in episode three, we suspected he’d have a bigger role to play. And so it proved. With suspicious sidekick Karin (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) sniffing around his shady global fund, Alex rehired Tobe on a freelance basis to cover his electronic trail.

We enjoyed Alex and Tobe’s wary stand-off becoming a budding friendship. “Fortunately for you, I know as much about financial fraud as you do about cyber-security,” said the sarky IT nerd, shyly avoiding eye contact and sporting a T-shirt by real-life Indonesian hardcore band Burgerkill.

The pair then bickered amusingly over who worked harder, had more friends and the most fun, before Tobe shrugged: “Trust me, in this world, you’re an innocent.” I wouldn’t be so sure anymore.

It was Tobe who recommended chatroom buddy Jammy as the best hacker in India. Dilly soon barged into his Bangalore home for some of his unique brand of persuasion – sweetened by a cricket bat signed by Indian superstar Virat Kohli for Jammy’s cricket-mad son. (A neat echo of this came later, when the slumdogs pointed out Chopra’s cadaver with an altogether scruffier bat.)

Jammy duly did Dilly’s bidding by hacking into a circuitous chain of restaurant booking systems, email inboxes, chocolate vending machines and, ultimately, the wi-fi network at Mumbai Port Authority. “It’s like Pac-Man,” said Dilly with grudging admiration. But will it soon be game over?

Is Rebecca and Alex’s relationship doomed?

Back in London, Karin found that Alex’s new fund wasn’t just password-protected but he was running it solo, with no reports filed to colleagues. Meanwhile, fiancé Rebecca Harper (Juliet Rylance) found his secret second phone.

The two women met up to discuss their worries at the historic and aptly-named Hung, Drawn & Quartered pub in Tower Hill (half a Guinness for Rebecca – a hint that she’s about to fall pregnant, possibly?). Rebecca’s discovery that Alex had also been checking the weather in the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Dubai, Tel Aviv and Geneva confirmed her suspicions and she confronted Alex.

“I invest in emerging markets,” he explained. “I work in these places and so do you.” “But I don’t visit tax havens and offshore sinkholes to launder some corrupt politician’s dirty money,” she retorted, as all her speeches about ethical capitalism came back to bite him.

His insistence that “You’re all I care about” followed episode three’s assertion: “Without you, I have no idea who I am.” For Alex, his relationship with Rebecca maintains his delusion that he’s still got “moral integrity” and is “doing things the right way, without my family’s involvement”. If he loses Rebecca, he might well lose his remaining moral compass too.

He came clean – well, partially – and promised to pull out, now that his business is back on its feet. Yet surely he’s in far too deep to escape now? And has all trust gone between the golden couple?

Prague problems led Vadim to rumble Kleiman

Determined to get his counterfeiting operation back on-track in the Czech capital, Vadim coldly shrugged off the murder in episode three (“A cop? He was a thief, stealing my goods”) and put new nemesis Karel Benes (Karel Roden) under surveillance.

The ex-policeman was too careful, so this proved unfruitful – but FSB insider Ilya Fedorov (Kirill Pirogov) found a way. He had drugs planted on Benes’ wildchild daughter, hacked her phone and piggybacked onto her father’s.

The call log soon revealed that it was Kleiman who was backing Benes’ sabotage of Vadim’s business and that they met in Prague shortly before Reznik “fell” from his apartment balcony. Crucially, Vadim also learnt that Kleiman had “an assistant” with him.

Remember Mendez admonishing Alex for lax security after travelling under his own passport? As Kleiman had warned his new protégé: “It won’t be long until Vadim traces it back to you and me.” The Russians could be coming, like they did for Uncle Boris (David Dencik).

Our hero’s family is falling apart

Since his infidelity was exposed in episode three, Dmitri (Aleksey Serebryakov, who also plays the titular medic in the Russian remake of House MD, fact fans) has been well and truly in the doghouse. Wife Oksana (Maria Shukshina) refused to chink her husband’s glass during the most awkward engagement drinks ever, and later told him: “You and the children are my whole life. You have spat on my soul.” Dmitri was on his knees begging for forgiveness. None was forthcoming.

We’re concerned about Alex’s sister Katya (Faye Marsay) too. She kicked off about the quality of her father’s champagne – cava, how ghastly – before the sound of breaking glass as she rowed with long-suffering boyfriend Femi (Clifford Samuel). Katya also seems to increasingly have the cocaine sniffles.

With all this talk of family being everything – by both Oksana and Alex – could Katya be the way his enemies get to Alex? The business end of the series promises to be explosive

#McMafia #James Norton #recap

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Bulletproof Monk is a Nietzschean Critique of Western Civilization.

It should be obvious to all that handing over the reins of a multimillion-dollar action movie to a man whose experience extends as far as making Christina Aguilera videos is not going to produce great art. It's not even going to produce a decent Crouching Tiger rip-off. If you are looking for decent fight choreography you could do worse than just getting Iron Monkey from 1993 instead; Donny Yen is a bad ass in that movie. That movie, however, is not the unconscious (and self-conscious) product of a civilization searching for actualization. That movie is the 2003 suck-fest that is Bulletproof Monk.

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The McGuffin of the movie is a magic scroll, protected by Buddhist monks in Tibet, which when read aloud grants the reader the power to make the world anew; a heaven in the hands of a good (super) man, or a hell in the hands of the weak, evil or corrupt. The monks have a single warrior who is the guardian of The Scroll of Good and Evil, and this man is granted great powers. Straight off the bat, we are talking about faith in particularly Christian terms. All of a sudden, Nazis!

It is apparently the 1940s, and the Nazis are doing Red Skull style searches for esoteric power. The Nazis are led by a man who knows of The Scroll and the power it contains and wants to take it all for himself. In my Nietzschean reading, I believe that this is the Word of God, left unattended by God post-mortem.

"Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves.”

From Will to Power, Preface, 2nd Paragraph

"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism... For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect."

Nazis in this meta-analysis represent the only culture Westerners have left so many decades later: variously, misplaced faith in the state, faith in society, and faith in technology. They are effectively a meme version of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th Century, we may as well consider them to be stand ins for Communism and rampant consumerism also. The first act of the Nazis in Bulletproof Monk is to murder the monks with MP-40s; literally, 'we' destroy the faithful with our technological creations. You can even read this as a metaphor for the New Atheists of the late 20th Century, we have so much insight from technology that we can convince ourselves that there is no need for faith at all, easily we can dispose of their simple arguments- represented here by the brother monks linking arms, their show of faith and togetherness against imminent destruction. Still, State and Science are not enough for the avatar of human intellect, the evil Nazi Strucker (Karel Roden).

All are insufficient to grant Strucker life eternal- only true faith can do that, and as we know, God is dead. That's why he seeks the magic scroll, which has the power of great good and evil- that's a faith analog. Strucker and the Nazis are modern Western society writ large throughout the film. And you thought this was a bad popcorn flick with Stiffler from American Pie in the lead. In any case, the eponymous Monk ( Yun-Fat Chow) briefly kicks some Nazis in the head before Strucker shoots him in the chest. The Monk falls from atop the mountain, clutching the Scroll. It's a deliberate dive, a leap of faith; the parallel to Jesus in the desert when he is tempted by Satan (Luke 4):

8And Jesus answered him, “It is written,

“‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’”

9And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10for it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,’

11and

“‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

12And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” 13And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.

That probably means we have Stifler from American Pie as Jesus. Deal with it.

In the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey reading, we have just witnessed a complete character arc- the Monk begins the movie as an apprentice, and by the end of the first scene has faced evil, taken the call to adventure, received supernatural aid and surpassed his mentor, and transformed in the abyss of death and rebirth. Quite a lot for an opening scene of a not-amazing film.

What I contend is happening is unintentional on the part of the moviemakers- either that or for reasons inexplicable, the director Paul Hunter managed in his sole feature film credit to construct a near perfect Nietzschean metaphor. There is also the likelihood I'm reading too much into pop-culture, but this is my column and I will do what I want; and if I want to tell you that trash Hollywood movies are warnings against nihilism and exhortations to a new cultural awakening, I will.

We then flash forward sixty years or so, to meet the true protagonist, Kar (Seann William Scott). Whereas the Nazis represent the Will to Power, the civilizational malaise caused by a lack of faith in a higher power, Kar is Western Civilization in modernity. He has no family, no history, and no interests other than himself. This is the elevation of consumer capitalism to the status of religion, expressed in his early scenes as Kar robs the Monk of the Scroll (unwittingly, of course) and then attempts to bargain it with the bizarre gang-leader Mr. Funktastic (Marcus Jean Pirae) in exchange for a peace treaty. Funktastic, a testosterone-driven Billy Idol clone who speaks only in cockney rhyming slang, attempts to literally castrate Kar for insulting him with a gift of faith that is condensed into the most powerful artifact on Earth. Freudian! Ignorance reigns on all sides, but in a fight -and with the assistance of a mysterious love interest- Kar manages to escape by using his martial arts skills. The Monk sees the fight and approves grudgingly.

Funktastic!

There's a lot going on in that scene, and none of it has to do with the layer of proto-philosophical schmaltz that has the routine fulfillment of prophecy trope playing out in the overt storyline. This is Nietzsche's “total eclipse of all values,” based on the rise of what Tom Wolfe described as “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods.” Nationalistic brotherhoods in the real world would be groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, rather than any sense of Nationalism as we understand it in the West today. Funktastic and his crew are one such brotherhood who threatens Kar/The West; who just wants to be left alone to steal from others. One might consider this to be a jab at Westerners who culturally appropriate, or act in stereotypically Black or Asian manners -see Eminem or Weeaboos. Kar is definitely a Chinaboo.

Kar is raised by a Japanese Man (Mako) who looks after a Chinese cinema. The reason is never explained. My reading of this is that Westerners have become so ignorant of other cultures (and by extension, ourselves in relation to other cultures) that all cultures are thus interchangeable. I think that this is where the ideas of multiculturalism and to a certain extent the criticism of cultural oppropriation comes from.

Kar trains himself in martial arts by copying old kung-fu movies, in a montage. We now have 3 Eastern archetypes training the West in learning re-connection to our collective soul- even William Scott's character named himself "Kar" Cantonese for family, so he will never be without one. Adorable! All he knows is theft and looking out for himself, very much the antithesis of faith or enlightened behaviour. Even the love interest Jade (Jaime King) is a metaphor; the daughter of a gangster -Russian, of course!- who leads a double life. We might consider her to be, variously, all three Brothers Karamazov, as she is ignored by her father (jailed for being a mobster) and leads a double life. Like Dmitri Karamazov, she spends her nights courting attention -with Mr. Funktastic of all people- but is, in reality, spiritual, like Alyosha; and also a skeptic, like Ivan, when it comes to Kar at least. That's an interesting lens to view this movie through, too. Dostoyevsky had his own criticisms of civilization that appear to have been proven true.

And they both get into the Ethnostate! Yay!

Strucker and his grand-daughter ( Victoria Smurfit) show up to continue their pursuit of faith/Monk to transform themselves into supermen. Strucker is now very old, wizened by time. Their faith in the state to conquer and provide meaning has proven insufficient. These Nazis are so evil they even set up a highly leftist SocJus "Human Rights Organization" to hide their true motives. Another unintentional reveal of the underlying faith in society of the progressives/communists. This front company claims to denounce man's evil to man, but in fact, is hiding the worst evil of man; that we are faithless and self-serving. I found it quite cute in retrospect that we have literal Nazis propping up social justice causes here.

Meanwhile, Kar and the Monk become friends after a scene in which Kar tries to make the Monk leave his house by fighting him- and failing to do so, of course. The Monk is literally faith incarnate. Once that takes root in a civilization it seems hard to root it out.

An enlightened man would offer a weary traveler a bed for the night, and invite him to share a quiet conversation over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. ~ The Monk

If Western Civilization were enlightened, it would understand that faith itself is not something to be fought against, but to be conversed with. I think that's what is going on there at least. In any event, Kar and the Monk go on a buddy-cop adventure in which, shock and horror, the Scroll is lost to the Nazis. Fortunately, it transpires that the Scroll is actually a recipe for noodle soup! That message is expanded on when the Monk talks pure Greek Philosophy while teaching Kar about fighting. Martial arts itself in this movie is a metaphor for internal struggle.

It's not about anger - it's about peace. It's not about power - it's about grace. It's not about knowing your enemy - it's about knowing yourself. ~The Monk, channeling the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. nosce te ipsum.

Without going scene by scene I think you can catch the point I am trying to make. The Nazis are so evil they kidnap a bunch of Buddhist Monks to literally suck the spirituality out of their minds using some device involving rushing water, Strucker achieves part of his goal by reading the words of faith from the scroll which had been tattooed onto the Monk this whole time. He is resurrected and dons his Nazi uniform once again to proclaim his evil nature. In the Nietzschean reading, he is not the superman- he is what the Nazis believed Nietzsche meant by the superman.

You have to admire his commitment to Hugo Boss if nothing else.

The Monk, wise as ever, keeps part of the secret in his own mind. Strucker is incomplete, as he lacks the true humility of faith that the brotherhood of monks knew at the start of the movie- the literal Word of God cannot be wielded by man; any man. That understanding is faith in the creator, that understanding is what the Nazis and Communists failed to comprehend, leading to mass murder on a scale never seen before in history.

Air is as real as you and me. You have to step on it as if it were a stone, swim through it as if it were the sea. All you have to do is truly believe. -The Monk

And then Kar kicks the Nazi-Superman off a building with his righteous belief. Deus Vult!

If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed. — Nietzsche, Will to Power

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Alright, it's not a perfect analogy and I think the Nietzschean idea of the Superman does not come to fruition with Kar's ascension to protector of the scroll; in fact, Jade also ascends, to provide a true, living Tao element to the movie. What my reading thus concludes is that this story is one of Western Civilization rediscovering faith, through the rejection of the failures of the 20th Century; state worship, society worship, self-worship and ultimately the rejection of minority-worship and multiculturalism also.

Kar through his transformation into the Guardian of the Scroll defeats the Nazi Spectre- the very real threat of supremacy ideology- that is his negation, the opposite of the life force he represents throughout the whole film. He also is bound to his divine feminine counterpart "for life" through faith, essentially restoring conservative idealsof marriage and family- the same family that Kar felt he never had and so adopted the concept of family from Cantonese. Now dressed in superfly leathers, Kar and Jade wish the Monk a happy retirement; a symbolic passing of the torch so to speak, from the ancient spiritual philosophies of the East to the still relatively new and immature Christendom.

So, maybe I've read too much into a movie which is objectively trashy and it reveals more about me than anything else; but that was fun. I'd like to think that the Western culture that we inhabit is alive, more than just a few hundred million points of consciousness screaming into the void. If that is true, then the collective song of our people will throw out strangely prescient pop-culture that embeds hidden meanings, without the active intent of anyone involved. In all honesty it could only be in a truly nihilistic and lost culture that Bulletproof Monk could ever be made. This movie sucks, but I love it anyway.

As the Monk says, "Water which is too pure has no fish." There's probably zero meaning in that.

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jamesginortonblog · 6 years

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Twenty years from now, you might find yourself sitting by the fire, telling tall tales to young ’uns about the madness and the mayhem of this century’s teenage years, and you might find yourself thinking — if only there was some kind of, I don’t know, TV drama that accurately encapsulated almost everything that was going on in the world in 2017, one that also felt like James Bond meets The Godfather. My friend, the drama you would be looking for is McMafia.

The series is the BBC’s big-budget new-year crime drama. Starring James Norton, Juliet Rylance and David Strathairn, alongside a host of Russian, Israeli, Brazilian and Serbian stars playing mob bosses from their home territory, it blends the stylish globetrotting of The Night Manager and The Sopranos’ take on family values, with a dark underpinning in reality.

McMafia’s script began life as a 2008 book of the same name, an epic study of organised crime by the investigative journalist Misha Glenny; it was then wrestled into a drama by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Hossein Amini, best known for the Ryan Gosling thriller Drive. At first sight, this looks like another of those impossible-to-film tomes with which British TV is currently besotted. (The City & the City? The Patrick Melrose novels? Are you all insane?) Glenny’s tome details the rise of criminal empires from the dust of eastern Europe’s communist states and the globalisation of crime across continents, using free-market tropes. The term “McMafia”, for instance, is a reference to the Chechen gangs who franchise out the feared Chechen name to thugs across Europe, like a gun-toting Ronald McDonald.

Amini was hauled into the project by James Watkins, the director of Black Mirror and The Woman in Black, who had been trying to squeeze Glenny’s sprawling book into a feature film. “We sat in a little garden at the V&A — which, ironically, ended up in the series — and decided it could only be a TV series,” Watkins recalls as we squat on some antique furniture during a break in the filming of a violent chase in a country house. “It’s got whorls and tone, but no actual characters.”

Over the book’s fragmented vignettes, Amini lays an action thriller-cum-family-drama structure at whose heart is Alex Godman (Norton), the son of a Russian oligarch who was educated at an English boarding school, runs a successful hedge fund and is preparing to marry his ethical activist girlfriend, Rebecca, played by Rylance. When his dodgy uncle starts meddling in Moscow, Alex’s perfect life falls apart and he is thrown into the family business with increasing vigour.

“There are elements of Alex that are based on me,” Amini explains as he joins us. “I came to the UK from Iran in 1977. I was bullied at school for being foreign and found it hard to adjust. My parents can’t go back to Iran, although I could… All of this I put into Alex. So that notion of what it’s like to be Russian, but sometimes be ashamed of being Russian, and trying to work out if you’re British or Russian or something else — that’s very personal.”

Amini writes — or at least rewrites — roles once the lead actor has been cast. Drive’s sparse, moody script was as inspired by Gosling as by James Sallis’s original book. With Norton, he has done much the same thing, sculpting Alex to fit Norton’s natural sense of cool detachment as he boots up his inner Michael Corleone, against the backdrop of a violent global black economy that snakes its tentacles through everything from politics to the illegal deals smartphone makers rely on for their raw materials.

“We saw James playing the Russian aristocratic gentleman in War & Peace, a cultivated Englishman in Grantchester. Then there was Happy Valley, where he’s got this quiet, damaged fury — and it was obvious he would be perfect for a Russian bear inside a bowler hat,” Amini says.

“The thing about Alex is, he’s not a villain and he’s not a hero,” Norton tells me a few months later, as we sit by the Adriatic on Croatia’s Istria peninsula — which is doubling as the south of France and Tel Aviv. “He’s trying to do the right thing, but he’s being screwed up and twisted and turned, and he gets into this sort of spiralling, chaotic mess. They tell me they didn’t see anyone else for the role — I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. What did they see in me?”

Norton’s performance here will do nothing to dampen rumours that he’s the next Bond after Daniel Craig hangs up his Walther PPK. From the moment he steps out of a black cab in a tux onto the steps of the V&A — through spectacular assassination attempts, scenes of brutally trafficked young women, oblique references to the criminal machinations of the Russian government, high-speed chases through luxury mansions and dubious deals in pulsing Tel Aviv nightclubs, with some flashy high finance thrown in — his role has pretty much every ingredient necessary for 007, including the occasional raised eyebrow.

“To be honest, it’s mad, this crazy speculation,” Norton says with a quick laugh. “I think Daniel Craig’s going to do another two. I’m aware that James and Hoss putting me in a tux at the V&A couldn’t be more incendiary. I did say to them, ‘Are you just baiting me and stoking the fire?’”

Either way, he’s aware that this is a potentially career-changing role — not that he’s done badly so far. His elegantly foppish performances in Death Comes to Pemberley and Life in Squares led, unexpectedly, to Sally Wainwright picking him to play Royce, the dark, psychopathic nemesis to Sarah Lancashire’s troubled Catherine Cawood in two series of Happy Valley. The crime-solving vicar Sidney Chambers in Grantchester came shortly after, and he’s been in War & Peace, Flatliners and Black Mirror since then. As Alex, though, he has finally earned leading-man status.

“It’s terrifying in a way, because there’s nowhere to hide, really,” he says, giving a small smile. “Before, my agent was saying I should maybe move to a bit of theatre or a bit of film. Now he’s saying I need to decide how this is going to affect me and where I go next... It’s an AMC and BBC show, the budget is huge, we have Hoss, David Farr and James Watkins on the script, the supporting cast are all A-listers. Being the thread through all those people, I just hope I’m not the one to cock it up.”

The A-list cast, it’s fair to say, is not only impressive, but requires a little explanation. Every television drama project these days has to scream a little louder than the last just to get attention. In 2016, roughly 1,200 brand-new scripted shows were launched in the world’s main television markets, according to the industry number-cruncher the Wit — and estimates for 2017 suggest there will have been considerably more, as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat launched scripted streaming services and Netflix alone produced 90 shows just in Europe.

McMafia is effectively the BBC’s answer to this internationalisation of talent. The Leviathan star Aleksey Serebryakov and Mariya Shukshina, a Russian TV stalwart, play Alex’s dubious oligarch parents; the Georgian actor Merab Ninidze proves oddly charming as the Kremlin-connected mobster Vadim; the Czech actor and regular Hollywood heavy Karel Roden delivers a weary ex-cop turned crime lord; and the Bollywood star Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a corrupt Mumbai importer, Dilly Mahmood.

Russians, in other words, play Russians, Indians play Indians and Brazilians play Brazilians. When nationalities speak among themselves, they do so in their own tongue, rather than in the heavily accented pidgin English beloved of earlier shows. Sometimes there are subtitles, sometimes not. It’s a mark of how cosmopolitan the British viewer has become that a primetime drama on a mainstream channel can now drift seamlessly between languages.

“People in the UK don’t really know who these people are, but in their own world, they’re enormous superstar figures and have this immense skill set,” Watkins says. “Some of the Russian actors do so much with so little. Whenever anyone comes in to act with the Russians for the first time, we have to take them aside and say, ‘Look, this isn’t about you or your work, which we love — but before you act with them, watch what they’re doing and make sure you can match it, because they’re setting the tone for the whole piece.’”

Watkins is keen to stress that the tone is gritty, rather than glamorous. Each location is shot with different filters, and the dark, unsettling horror underpinning the action tends to be in the bleached-out bright sunlight of the Middle East. This is grimly true of the second episode, in which a young Russian beautician, Ludmilla, arrives in Egypt for a hotel job. She is picked up by a couple of cheerful locals, who drive her out of Cairo to a concrete shed where she’s beaten, tied up and shoved into the back of a van before being sold on to an armed gang — the first stop in a brutal series of events that leave Ludmilla in Israel, sold on yet again to a haughty brothel keeper.

It’s a shocking subplot, coming so soon after an exotic party at the Palace of Versailles thrown by Vadim — the Russian gangster with Kremlin links — and all the more so because it is the one story lifted directly from Glenny’s book, and is thus, effectively, a dramatised documentary. Indeed, all of the darkest elements in the series are echoes of real life — Amini based one early killing on the 1991 assassination of the former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar. And Dimitri Godman’s drunken decline echoes the last grim years of Boris Berezovsky’s life. “We’ve tried not to chase events, because real life is always going to move faster,” Watkins says. “But every fresh headline almost seems to confirm the thesis that the corporate is becoming criminal and the criminal is becoming corporate — the intersection between criminality, intelligence agencies, banking and government.”

“Like most people, I thought the mafia was compelling and exciting,” Norton adds. “There’s money and fast cars and yachts and beautiful women. I hope people see that while we tell that story, we also tell the story of the cost — from human trafficking to drug-dealing and poverty-stricken junkies in Mumbai whose habits pay for someone’s superyacht.” He pauses. “Though I’m now aware that there are things in this phone that are unethically sourced, and I’m still using it every single day. So this probably won’t make a significant difference.”

Which is part of the final trick that Watkins and Amini play — constantly taking us back to London parties and ethical business launches by semi-legal tycoons, making clear our complicity in all the sordid crime and violent murders the show depicts. The most chilling paragraph in Glenny’s book does exactly the same.

“Organised crime is such a rewarding industry,” he writes, “because ordinary Western Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; sticking €50 notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labour on subsistence wages; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; or purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.”

So, if you do end up in 20 years’ time using McMafia as a document of our fractured era — from Russian political meddling to dubious oil deals to corrupt hedge funds and ruined human lives — you might want to prepare yourself for the obvious question from your loving offspring: what did you do to try to stop it?

#james norton #McMafia #Hossein Amini #article #The Times

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