«The clash», a thriller series on the hysteria of today’s world (score 7 and 1/2)- Corriere.it

The clash (Beef), 10 episodes of about 30 minutes each, a series that conquers quickly because behind the thriller dimension it is populated by various figures, shows the hysteria of today’s world, amorality and also the new way of looking at family life. Above all it shows adoration for the god Dollar, conjugated in many senses. interesting how the series conceived by Lee Sung Jin, with the supervision of Jake Schreier and Hikari, produced by A 24 the house awarded by the Oscars with Everything, everywhere… , is also the not so hidden diagram of the Asian population today in the USA, in particular in a Californian region, Orange county, already home to a successful comedy.

The Clash can be read in many ways: a comedy steeped in black humour, a yellow that comes from the famous middle finger gesture that is used as a car insult, because this is where the mess that will involve the life and death of many people starts; if it were filmed in another way it could be an amusing outline for a romantic story, just as we see it as a magnifying and deformation glass leaning on multi-ethnic society and the art of getting by, always keeping a reserve card on the human factor. And there is also a social discourse because some characters are poor, humble: Danny Cho, Korean, an unfortunate real estate contractor who would like to help his family, lives with a dumb brother, Paul, and has a cousin on his heels who better lose him than to two half-baked gangsters.

he who is involved in the near traffic accident who consumes everything with his finger, but makes him swear eternal revenge towards (I’ll find out later) a rich Chinese woman who has a business in a plant shop that she’s selling for an enormous sum, has a pseudo-Japanese artist husband and a little girl, plus a mother-in-law who can’t stand her. But in the story, very intricate even on a family level because it follows an internal emotional and sexual history and parallel to the economic one, anything goes. The lives of the characters always fit together according to an unfortunate fate, the Gods of Chance play against, causing accidents, fires, mystical and banking crises, trips to Las Vegas such as the Hangover, prisons, thefts, everything and more with the police who always arrives late.

When, in the ninth episode, it would seem all dramatically resolved, after a family falls apart for nothing, here is the tenth different episode, almost shocking because it uses other styles, becomes almost metaphysical, definitely desperate, but we can’t reveal more: there is the loss of the path and the loss of consciousness, plus another real fight this time. An hallucinatory state that becomes the final figure of a curious film, very well acted by a very fierce crew, and of a series that will perhaps have an encore.