Over the years we have been extensively get used to it to products acclimatize in historical periods prior to ours, developing in the public a particular fascination especially for 80s, or at least for what we believe were those years. From Stranger Things to many other products that have made use of that particular and same aesthetic, the interest for those years has become more and more heated from time to time, up to the product we are talking about today in preview: Bang Bang Baby. It is a TV series that has its roots in literary form and in the aforementioned years, developing a story that tries to touch us even in the first person. You can find it in the catalog of Amazon Prime Video from April 28, 2022.
Origins of a heart
In the former 5 episodes that we could see of Bang Bang Baby you can already fully breathe all of his thematic. The TV series is based on the book The untouchablefrom Marisa Merico published by Sperling & Kupfer, and from it he develops his plot, drawing fully on the style of his writer. The main plot revolves around this young woman named Alice (Arianna Becheroni) who lives alone with her mother Gabriella (Lucia Mascino) in a town in the north of Italy. Shy and intorverted, the entire narrative is accompanied by her voice which narrates and narrates itself in a series of background reflections on the events represented. Alice has lost hers father when she was very young, and this loss marked her deeply, also given the bloody disappearance that saw him go away forever from her life. Ten years after this event, however, the girl discovers that the situation is not like she has always been told. Her father (Adriano Giannini) is not never disappeared, his mother simply kept him at a distance from her daughter because of his life criminal.
These are the premises of Bang Bang Babyon a journey that starts from a discovery and then lands in the maze of a large one extremely dysfunctional family. Alice, in order to find her father, tracks down her grandmother and reconnects relations with her. Grandma Lina (Dora Romano) remains undoubtedly one of the most fascinating characters faced so far. Cold and unscrupulous she is the guide and boss of his family, within the organized crime of Milan. The about him is one of those stories that is slowly pitted from episode to episode, playing a central role not only in the emotional reading of the series, but in the events themselves that draw it. Merciless and without hesitation hers is a path in which we will learn to know her for better or for worse, ready to face anything in the amalgam of narrative knots to carry on the plot itself.
Bang Bang Baby then talk about family, not of an ordinary family though. He opens his story starting from an extremely classic incipit and then tries to analyze the relationship between a child daughter of a healthy context, with a family deeply immersed in blood, violence and crime. The contrast between the two contexts and the way in which they will affect the girl remains the main road on which the story moves, but also leaving room for many other small things that develop in a narrative chorality well organized. The characters make the history but also the context, this Italy of the 80s represented in its conceptual progress and with all its hypocrisies.
A postcard designed by a cartoonist
From the point of view formal this Bang Bang Baby it is perfectly linked to the photography of many other contemporary products, such as Stranger Things, Riverdale – to name two examples – always resulting on the edge of experimentalism. The various directors (Michele Alhaique, Margherita Ferri and Giuseppe Bonito) play a lot with lights and colors, giving back sensations that very often recall the chromatic compositions of comic books. Milan in the 80s is extremely attractive in its forms, in the way it was chosen to cut out the environments through the composition of the frames and a geometric use of sets. A minimum of experimentalism is merged with all this regarding the camera, always, or almost always, dynamic and in motion, used to portray these dark characters in a context that cloaks them with charm but also with terror, without a real one. glorification. Apparently a product comes out storyteller in the colorful aesthetic, oscillating between the crudest seriousness of a problematic context, and a certain type of black comedy, of black humor ready to plug the bloodiest dynamics. Speaking of writing, at least for now, he hasn’t convinced us too much about Alice’s evolution / involution. Her seems to be a far too quick journey and detachedaseptic towards what surrounds it and in any case involved, turned off and on, unattainable by common logic (rightly) but never really deepened to the end.
