Sugar: Fernando Meirelles films Hollywood taken over by crime – 04/03/2024 – Illustrated

Fernando Meirelles has been making films in Los Angeles for two decades, and for two decades he has felt like a foreigner in the city of stars. Even after directing American films such as “Dois Papas” and “The Constant Gardener”, the São Paulo native says he will never feel entirely part of that universe of old dynasties and big studios.

Precisely for this reason, his vision as a foreigner gave a new flavor to the first international series he directed, “Sugar”, which arrives this week on Apple TV+. “I’m not part of this reality at all. I have an outside vision, and I needed to know Los Angeles to be able to show it in the series”, says the filmmaker in a video interview.

“Sugar” delves into the underworld of Hollywood and has its characters play industry bigwigs – who, the producers warn, are not versions of real people. In the police drama, an elderly mega-producer is looking for his granddaughter, the only part of the bloodsucking and problematic family – like many hypermedia players in the industry – that still matters to him.

But at the center of the plot is, in fact, a private detective. Obsessed with cinema, he doesn’t hide his excitement when the case of the mega-producer, responsible for past classics that formed his cinephilia, falls into his hands.

Colin Farrell, as protagonist John Sugar, seems like a man lost in time. He buys his suits on London’s Savile Row tailoring street, drives a royal blue Cadillac and wields a revolver used by old Hollywood legend Glenn Ford – the only way to put a gun in the hand of the detective, who detests them.

Thus, “Sugar” also seems like a period series. It takes time for the viewer to get used to the fact that the action takes place in the present. These are smartphones and tablets – of course, from Apple – that break with the film noir veneer that Meirelles and cinematographer César Charlone, his collaborator on “City of God” and other projects, wanted to convey.

“This character is like an anthropologist, who tries to understand humanity through cinema, specifically cinema noir. He feels like the characters”, says Meirelles, who, because he is not very knowledgeable about the genre, spent his nights during the development of the film. project, watching his main films.

Popular in the 1940s and 1950s, film noir established itself as the most popular subgenre of crime cinema at the time, under the dramaturgical and aesthetic influence of German Expressionism. Thus, visually, their characters were outlined by strong shadows and a play of chiaroscuro that contributed to the inherent mystery, something that Meirelles and Charlone tried to mimic.

The dubious and flawed good guys of yesteryear were also present in John Sugar who works in a brutal field, although he only resorts to violence when strictly necessary. Classy, ​​he has a chivalry, an old-fashioned kindness, says producer Simon Kinberg, of films such as “Logan” and “The Martian”, and who wanted to balance the serious and cold detective side.

It is a duality that can also be seen in the Hollywood that Sugar reveres and the one that she encounters, when she enters this world in search of the granddaughter of the mega-producer, played by James Cromwell. “We talk about generations of this industry, from the classic era of the 1940s and 1950s, with its glamor and magic, to today, surrendered to vices and the commercial aspect”, says Kinberg.

Thus, excerpts from vintage films run over the scenes without prior warning, as if inviting the viewer into the mind of John Sugar. Recordings of an old Los Angeles also blend in with the now battered sidewalks, in a plot that holds a mystery that, for Meirelles, is much more about the protagonist than about the case he investigates.”