The White Lotus 2 is as we remembered it: unmissable

Looking at the thousands of products that arrive on the platforms every day, it is clear that, lately, there is a certain amount of ruthlessness around that can make the difference between good and bad. Taken as we are by the fear of offending someone and being indelicate even when our intentions are the best, it’s as if the writers were writing the episodes with the handbrake on, leading us to exalt ourselves as never before in the presence of series that do not care about the superstructures and go straight to the point. One of these is The White Lotus, the delightful HBO series broadcast in Italy on Sky that in the first season did not spare a ferocious social satire towards the rich and their whims. Observing the obstinacy of a guest ready to do anything to stay in the most beautiful and expensive suite in the hotel and witnessing the psychic breakdown of a middle-aged woman unable to manage her mother’s death was a slap in the face for the public. to remind us how fundamental writing is in a television series. The first season of The White Lotusdue to the containment provisions related to the pandemic, it was shot entirely in an enclosed environment, that is a resort in Hawaii that led the screenwriters to struggle their brains to justify a series of events consumed within such a small and restricted. The result was a multi-Emmy award-winning masterpiece that he couldn’t get HBO and showrunner Mike White to replicate the miracle with a second part, turning the miniseries into an anthology series.

Here, then, The White Lotus 2, a series usable independently of the first and set in Italy, more precisely in Sicily. As we could have expected, the human portrait that emerges from the stories of the protagonists, guests of a 5-star luxury hotel in the heart of Taormina, he’s merciless, and we couldn’t have believed more. In fact, from the first episode we witness the presentation of a choral cast that has in common the permanence within a structure, the White Lotus (which, in reality, is the San Domenico Palace in Taormina), which becomes the scene of small and large dramas consumed within a setting that Stanis La Rochelle would have defined as “too Italian”. This series, in fact, is excessive, baroque, excessive, full of stereotypes and Italian songs ranging from Mina to Ornella Vanoni, from Fabrizio De André to Myss Keta, which, however, are not as disturbing as the repertoire used in the forgettable Eat, pray, love by Ryan Murphy because they represent a functional gear to the toy that White has developed with surgical precision.

In The White Lotus 2in fact, there is everything. The forced coexistence of two couples, the one formed by Meghann Fahy and by Theo James – which in the series is granted a full nude at the first episode which immediately went viral on the Net -, and the one formed by Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe who pretend love and fun in front but that deep down they can’t stand each other; the journey into his own roots of a patriarch of Sicilian origins interpreted by a monumental F. Murray Abraham escorted by his son and grandson; the emotional breakdown of a young assistant forced to run after the bizarre desires of her employer and, of course, her, the most intriguing character of the White Lotus number 1: Tanya McQuoidplayed by a Jennifer Coolidge stratospheric which the world has finally noticed. Seeing this woman massacred by Botox who thinks that it is enough to put a scarf on her head and whiz around aboard a Vespa to be like Monica Vitti and savor her very personal “Italian Dream” is perhaps the most fun and grotesque thing of this season, along with a very Italian touch offered by the actresses of our house, by the talented Beatrice Grannò and Simona Tabasco in the role of Lucia and Mia, two escorts looking for opportunities and adventure, to the hilarious Sabrina Impacciatore in the role of the director of White Lotus which seems to possess the same degree of latent hysteria as Laura Morante’s characters. In between there is everything: sex, masturbation, music, glasses of prosecco, one thousand euro a night suites, nastiness, love, compassion and a bit of that healthy ruthlessness that is often lacking in today’s screenwriters.

The result, we said at the beginning, is a deliberately exaggerated series from which we cannot take our eyes off because The White Lotus is what we have always dreamed of seeing: a product that does not discount anyone and that manages to portray the atrocities and human miseries outspokenly, showing us how much money, hunger for sex and thirst for power can make us regress to the feral state from which we all hope to be away. See it and give it a chance: you will come out confused, and hopefully also have fun.

The White Lotus: Sabrina Impacciatore, Simona Tabasco and Beatrice Grannò in the cast of the second chapter

The White Lotusthe summer tv series

Beatrice Grannò: “Dreaming of music”

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