Get rich or die trying. It is not the new proclamation of a streaming film platform that has decided to put an end to shared accounts, but of The Counterfeiters (Farzi), the new Prime Video series.
Famed Indian writers, directors and producers Raj & DK have returned to the amazon platform with a new story: two young Indians from the lower class who will start a dangerous race for wealth through counterfeiting money.
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after harvest the success of The Family Manthe filmmaking duo have almost become the new emblem of Indian cinema: their style, stories and characters have landed them their second series on the platform and a new deal with Netflix.
The Counterfeiters It follows the same lines of his previous works, offering a dynamic story, with a striking cast that draws from Western commercial cinema and a narration that uses humor as a gas escape from the tension generated by the plot and its themes.
India adds a new “Prime Original”
Sunny (Shahid Kapoor) is a young man with a unique artistic talent to replicate the work of the great painters of our history. A genius of imitation with a gift inherited from his grandfather (Amol Palekar), author of a cultural magazine with which he intends to stir the consciences of the Indian population.
The first thing that Raj & DK do is show us an extremely class-oriented society, almost parodic, with a marked barrier between rich and poor that is accentuated by the archaic custom of arranged marriages.
That barrier is also racial; from the eyes with which we see a society whose customs are strange to us, but with that strange obsession with imitating Hollywood cinema that ends in a disconcerting pastiche.
All that elitist representation is the breeding ground for the main plot: counterfeiting of banknotes on a large scale. Using her grandfather’s printing press and her artistic knowledge, Sunny manages to reproduce the Indian rupee with goldsmith’s accuracy.
This process is also shown to us using a montage sequence along the lines of La Casa de Papel, which we expected to be as inevitable as Marvel’s Thanos.
From here, escalation of violence. Do not expect a deep criminal development, nor a great reflection on the starting conditions of the society that they represent us; it is a race to the top in which the story will open its sights to an ensemble cast to see the different approaches to it.
Yes, Shahid Kapoor has the charisma that the series puts its faith in in the pilot, but his hour-long episodes they dilute their impact minute by minute until they completely lose interest in their character development.
What we cannot deny Farzi’s first season is its state of grace with the rhythm inherited from the montage.
Raj and DK manage to capture on the screen the same fun that they show in the creation of their stories. It is not so much a representation of reality, but rather the exaggerated and, once again, parodic reality that they have lived on the streets.
Conclusions of the new Amazon Prime series
The native Indian public finds the sweet note in the script, in its dialogues. We, on the other hand, collide face to face with overacted scenes with humorous highlights that seem completely unintentional.
It is one more rung of that ladder in which we could also cross paths with the successful Turkish soap operas that have emerged brilliantly on television and platforms in recent years, but dealing with more transcendental issues and stories.
In The Counterfeitershowever, a mixture of genres that produces mixed sensations as part of that regional duty of the eyes with which we see it remains perennial.
We have themes whose depth is evident: social hierarchy, elites, job ambition, family ideological inheritance… But, far from the classic emotional focus of soap operas that we mentioned before, the Prime Video series flies over all of them without offering any results.
If you come for entertainment, you can find a spot on the sofa if you have a few hours to spare. If your approach is looking for something more sensible, throw in a new coin and try your luck again among the new series on the platform.
