Acharnés on Netflix: a masterful season 2 (review)
Lee Sung Jin has written characters of exceptional density and humanity, as endearing as they are detestable and embodied by an impressive cast. What more could you ask for?
As if he was exploring the seven deadly sins, season after season.
After a first story dominated by anger, Lee Sung Jin attacks envy. Season 2 of Beef, online on Netflix for a few days, completely changes scenery with a new burst of episodes which continues to probe the darkest areas of the human being, its failings as well as its most fragile impulses, and above all its worst instincts.
Without transition, we are in Montecito, California, an opulent community in the suburbs of Santa Barbara, where Josh and Lindsay run a luxury country club. Their marriage is not going well. She dreams of something else. He clings to a certain way of life, close to the rich and powerful. As they argue further, screams rise in decibels and precious objects smash against the walls in an explosion of fiery violence. A brutal domestic sequence witnessed, despite themselves, by two young club employees, who film the domestic scene. First to protect the wife, whom they consider a victim, then with a much less noble idea: using the video to blackmail their bosses!
Because in Acharnés, no one is really nice, no one is really bad. Like an already astonishing first season, Lee Sung Jin confirms an astonishing sense of character: each character rings true, both perfectly identifiable and deeply unsympathetic. Beings capable of the best and the worst, such is the guideline of the creator, who dissects the couple with delightful mastery. The Korean-American screenwriter and director first contrasts boomers with Gen Z with biting irony, where two visions of the world and of love look at each other with contempt. Then he dissects, with great intelligence, what it means to be in a relationship: what we accept, what we endure, what we sacrifice to go the distance. A form of renunciation of one’s individuality which we will see (it depends) as a proof of ultimate love or a resignation in the face of the established order.
Everyone will recognize themselves at one time or another, while Acharnés continues to autopsy human relationships with surgical precision. With an impressive sense of narrative construction and clever writing, Lee Sung Jin guides his couples towards terribly coherent outcomes, since they all fantasize about a certain emancipation while they have in common this clandestine American dream, an unacknowledged desire to assimilate to the capitalist system and to climb the rungs of the social ladder. In this sense, this season of Acharnés is reminiscent of the heyday of White Lotus.
In fact, all this is not very comfortable. The atmosphere is bitter, the dialogues scathing, the drama cutting. And the messy ending will no doubt leave some raised eyebrows. But the series remains a work of great rigor, an ideal terrain for XXL performances.
Facing stars Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac, deliciously devious and driven by a jubilant perversity, it is the young shoots Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton who form this season’s winning couple. The revelation of Alien: Romulus and that of Warfare are truly astonishing as judgmental lovers, always quick to judge others, especially the previous generation, and yet doomed to reproduce the same patterns against all odds. Cruel but lucid, it’s Beef’s sauce.
Acharnés, season 2 in 8 episodes, to watch on Netflix
