Love letter to the genre of the 40s, 50s and 60s in the way of telling and filming. But, far from copying recurring references, the cynicism that is always assumed for the detective and the femme fatal halo of the female characters he encounters in this series mutate and are updated.
To begin with, because the researcher John Sugaran expert in finding lost people, is a man of integrity, vulnerable, moving and deeply empathetic, traits contributed by Colin Farrell who, in addition to being the protagonist, is an executive producer and who was in charge of giving the final touches to the character. Immense and charismatic, Farrell is here the living image of a broken man tormented by a dark past and an arm that gives him a bad life.
A dandy detective, polyglot and film buff
However, his portrait does not completely escape the intentional cliché and enriches the investigator’s personality with impeccable suits made to measure on Savile Row (in the heart of London Mayfair), a love of languages, good whiskey, old cars, writing diaries and living in a hotel room. But above all, and here begins the series’ first tribute to the seventh art, Sugar is a seasoned cinephile –”a movie buff is subtle. I’m addicted,” he says-, who reads Cahièrs du Cinema and that he only accepts carrying a gun because it was the one he used Glenn Ford in ‘The Bribed’ (1953).
The celebration of the noir genre begins in the series from minute one when images filmed in black and white by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (‘The Constant Gardener’, ‘The Two Popes’) and the detective’s voice-over, take us to the Tokyo contemporary and the happy outcome of the kidnapping of the son of a member of the yakuza. With the case solved John Sugar returns to The Angelsthe image to color and the plot to a new event, now in full hollywoodwhere the detective is hired by a film producer, Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), to find his missing granddaughter, a twenty-year-old confused with a past of drug addiction.
Return to the black genre
From that moment on the rhythm of the plot, which seems to follow that set by the scores of the legendary composer Max Steineraddresses issues such as racism, immigration, sexual harassmenthuman trafficking and twisted conspiracies while peppering the plot with original scenes from ‘The maltese falcon‘ (1941), ‘A Detective’s Story’ (1944), ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946), ‘Return to the Past’ (1947), ‘‘Twilight of the Gods’ (1950), ‘The Deadly Kiss’ (1955), ‘Thus Speaks Love’ (1971), ‘Gilda‘ (1946) or the already mentioned ‘The Bribed’ (1953), among others. A true delight for lovers of the genre in which there is no shortage of clear references to ‘chinatown‘ (1974) and which redoubles its appeal for ‘noir’ devotees by filming in identical locations from ‘LA Confidential’ (the bar where Sugar meets Melanie, the missing girl’s stepmother, is the legendary Boardner’s) or in the former house of producer Albert Broccoli (the saga of James Bond) converted here into the mansion of Siegel, John Sugar’s client.
Behind this referential puzzle – created by the editor Fernando Stutza regular collaborator of Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, with eight episodes and an unexpected ending that can be seen on Apple TV+, is Mark Protosevich. A prolific screenwriter who reformulated the science fiction thriller with ‘The Cell’ (2000) and to whom we owe ‘Oldboy’ (2013), ‘I Am Legend’ or the first ‘Thor’ (2011). Protosevich has poured into ‘Sugar’ his own fascination with cinema that he began as a child and that in his adolescence he turned into a ritual: watching at least six films a week in neighborhood theaters in Chicago. In all this cinephile arsenal, it occupies a prominent place ‘Story of a detective (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), adaptation of the novel by Raymond Chandler ‘Bye doll’, which he sees at least twice a year and which was the germ of ‘Sugar’. “Who knows,” says Protosevich, “maybe the series will spark some people’s curiosity about the references that appear in the episodes. If some of them end up watching ‘The night of the hunter‘For the first time, I will be absolutely thrilled.”
