Hands-legs for love

Twelve-year-old Charlie lies in the California hospital, similar to the Hogwarts hybrid and Google headquarters. Little patients have huge chambers with guitars and graffiti, its own school and flowering chilaut on the roof, and outside the hospital resembles a brilliant white tower. True, it cannot use all this luxury of Charlie, because it lies in a coma. His only entertainment is to peep for five older guys and report to the audience about their adventures. The five resembles the “Breakfast” club in hospital robes.

Leo (Charlie Rowe) - started a philosopher who lost his feet in the war with cancer, in which he is far from victory. The girl in the hat Emma (Siser Bravo) is a nervous peel-perccher, a patient with anorexia, a kind of Hermione in hipster rags. Black Hooligan Dash (young showman, nicknamed Astro) is an awkward epileptic who dreams of losing her virginity with a nurse. The bitchy chirlidersha-handman Kara (Zoe Levin) in the hospital finds out that the heart that she did not use much needs transplantation. Finally, the protagonist Jordi (Nolan Sotillo) comes to the hospital himself: he has no parents, he comes from Mexico, but a cancer sits in his leg, and a smart wolf knows how to make American doctors take up his case.

While other TV shows are trading in cynicism, this, on the contrary, is a sugar in a sugar in a sugar.

Almost the main (there is also the Gotham Telecomix) Autumn Premiere of the Fox channel begins with a description of the last day of Jordi for its two. Heroes get acquainted, recognize their diagnoses, begin to fall in love and arrange a party in honor of the new one. In the climax, adolescents who just go through “Henry V” make the king’s famous speech before the battle of Azenkur about the brothers gang and exchange the red bracelets of seriously ill patients. This scene contains a double game of words: Band in English is not only a gang, but also a tape (in this case on the hand). And Red Band is not only a red bracelet, but also a specific term in cinema, designating "topics for adults." For example, cinemas are always shown by fillets of films marked as Green Band : they have neither battle, no violence, nor nudes, nor drugs with alcohol. And in the so -called Red Band videos, which are placed on You T Ube , all this can easily be. Thus, the series “Red Band Society” (“Red Bracelets” in Russia) already declares its name that he intends to speak with adolescents (more, it seems, girls) on adult topics. For example, about death.

I would like to have a biasedly assume that a children's series with one-legged heroes who are about to die-the result of a special evolution of modern American television, trying to look darker, more realistic and tougher every year. But this is not so. Firstly, Fox is the air channel, and most of the experiments with anti-Heroes, sudden deaths and all bodily (for example, Jamie Lannister’s severed hand in the HBO game) unfolds in cable networks. Secondly, the Red Bracelets is a remake of the Catalan series of the Polseres Vermelles series . The rights to its adaptation were bought, including in Russia. Recently, September 22, its inventory in Tuapse began. Among the directors are the director of "School" Natalya Meshchaninova and Oksana Bychkova. The customer is the first channel, who, among other things, bought the right to adapt the French hit “Les Revenants” . Thus, it is wrong to consider the story about the “red bracelets” purely. But the team, which, as one of the executive producers includes Stephen Spielberg, is based on a special layer of national culture. And from new television customs, on the contrary, it is removed. While other TV shows are trading in cynicism, this, on the contrary, is a sugar in a sugar in a sugar. With projects by Stephen Spielberg, it often happens. Even if he takes Stephen King.

The beginning of “red bracelets” is a sentimental essay in the genre of “Books and films that influenced me.” The heroes have problems with a wise tuberculosis of Holden Coolfield, but all of them, despite their diversity, are like him - the main American catcher in rye. The heartless girl Kara stands in line for heart transplantation, like a modern iron lumberjack from the "amazing wizard from the country of Oz." The characters are somewhat changed compared to the Catalan series to be more like children from John Hughes' Club of Breakfast. All the heroes (except perhaps girls with anorexia) adore the “American pie” - the sexual concern of Dash and the doctor named Dick, and beer with the grass, migrated from him here. Even actor Thomas Ian Nicholas, playing a volunteer who comes with a guitar to a boy in a coma, turns out to be a graduate of the very “American pie”, and his appearance is one of the most powerful special effects of the already melodramatic series.

American spectators in the comments on reviews are echidoting that they would be in such a luxurious hospital in their lives.

In the Red Bracelets there is also a mysticism that became a mandatory element of teenage tragicomedies after Harry Potter. When one of the heroes loses consciousness, little Charlie is immediately associated with him-and either tells important everyday wisdom (“life does not end in the hospital, but only begins”; “they will not be able to amputate your soul”), or asks him to order pizza. There are also references to Ken Kizi, but the local nurse Jackson (curtsy addressed to the series “Jackie’s sister”) performed by the winner of Oscar Octavia Spencer very shortly pretends to be the evil sister of Ratchist. Her heart-like absolutely all adults in the clinic, including hippies-millionaires and an impeccable surgeon-is overwhelmed with love.

This, in fact, is the only problem of “red bracelets”: they are incredibly a lot of good and beauty. American spectators in the comments on reviews are echidoting that they would be in such a luxurious hospital in their lives. Wonderful young actors do not look like sick people for a second. Lysin after chemotherapy in one of them is combined with expressive thick eyebrows. And a girl with anorexia looks healthier than most Hollywood starlets. A selfish hooligan is re -educated already in the first series, and among adults there is not a single contradictory character like a literature teacher from “above the abyss in rye”. Having taken up the most difficult topic, “red bracelets” avoid injuries, and sentimentality and irony are dosed, as in a recipe for some sedative means: ten cubes of the first, five-second. This is all the more strange that the stories about dying teenagers are not a taboo for a long time. Over the past month alone, two nightmarish films on this topic have been released - “If I stay” and “Stars are to blame for everything”.

After the pilot, it might even seem that Fox and Spielberg are simply not commercial suicides to injure the audience at the very beginning, but the second series puts everything in its place. Death in it retreats, the degree of drama is reduced, but the irony does not disappear - but it becomes worse. One -legged Leo is waiting for Jordi from the operating room to support a friend. But when it turns out that Jordi will not amputate the leg due to metastases, Leo understands that he was deceiving himself. In fact, he wanted the hospital to be another unhappy as he is. Jealousy, loneliness and shame make the hero escape from the hospital in a regular party - where everything gets worse. It is then that “red bracelets” are not discovered-the story is not about the mortally ill, but about the painfully alive. She needs a hospital as a space where children torn from everyday life are forced to grow up through "I can not." And diseases of this story are needed to show the development of characters at the extremum point: for the same purpose, films for adults send their heroes to war.

The second key scene of the episode is a quote from Winnie the Pooh suddenly popping up in an adult conversation, which once again pushing the series into a measurement of a fairy tale. After it, it is as strange to demand from this story the clarity of suffering as to demand from a patch so that he stinks, and from the tiger - so that he tore everyone into parts. “Red Bracelets” is good or bad, not a documentary about the struggle for life, but a universal fairy tale about overcoming difficulties addressed to all adolescents in general.

And if you accept this compromise, the series turns into a regular nice film from the Sandance festival. With soft humor and heavy centers, touching heroes and charming unknown actors, warm colors and songs in the range from The Who (of course, the choice falls on “My Generation” ) to Coldplay . These carefully produced naivety and spontaneity of the “red bracelets” refresh and bribe - especially against the background of gloomy and cynical series that we usually watch.

And the authors of the “School” and “Physrucia” can make this story really more sincere and real.