Tag Archives: drugs

Dom – The First Brazilian Series of Amazon Prime (Review)

Posted on by under Addiction, Aprender inglês, art, biography, Brazilian Novels, culture, filmes, history

The first Brazilian series on Amazon Prime, based on Tony Belloto’s novel (2020) and on the biographical account The Witch’s Kiss (2009), written by Victor Lomba – Pedro Dom’s father in real life – doesn’t disappoint.

Dom – Amazon Prime series

Against the backdrop of the military dictatorship, the beginning of the war against drugs, and the origins of the dissemination of cocaine in Brazil (in the early 1970s), we first meet Victor Dantas (Dom’s father, played by Filipe Bragança in the 1970s scenes of the series ), a naive and idealistic young man who gives up scuba diving and joins the police to fight the drug traffic.

Then, the series, in the course of three seasons, covers the development of Victor’s activities as a police agent, his marriage, the birth and raising of his kids, and the overall vicissitudes of the family until 2005.

The story of a middle-class family dealing with the addiction of one of their members, Victor’s son, Pedro Dom, a bright and energetic teenager, who starts snorting coke at the age of fourteen, and then rises to become one of the most feared and famous criminals in Rio, will keep you glued to the screen.

Gabriel Leone as Pedro Dom.

Since the movie City of God, Rio‘s complex environment (inequality, favelas, drugs, political corruption, and the destruction that chemical addiction inflicts within loving families) has never been shown with such brutality and realism.

Unlike City of God, though, the series’s producers don’t shrink from showing Rio de Janeiro in all its glorious beauty. So, scenes depicting the extreme poverty of life in the favelas are contrasted with stunning views of Copacabana Beach.

Copacabana Beach – Rio

The cast is fantastic across the board.

The love and bond between the father, Victor (played in his maturity by the excellent Flávio Tolezani), and the problematic son, Dom (Gabriel Leone‘s charismatic performance makes the character rather likable, a glamorous antihero) feels very real and moving.

The close bond between a father and his drug addicted son.

Dom and Victor are played by different actors at different ages – all of them do a wonderful job!

Don’t miss it.

If you saw the show and read any of the books about Pedro Dom, please leave your comment in the section below.

Jorge Sette

Euphoria (HBO): second season (review)

Posted on by under Addiction, art, culture, language, storytelling, tv series, TV shows, TY shows

Now that Zendaya won a Best Actress Emmy for the role of the drug addict Rue in the successful HBO series Euphoria, I’m rewatching the second season. I want to check out her performance and decide if the show is as good as I thought it was when I first saw it.

The series is definitely not for the faint of heart. The story, set in the fictitious town of East Highland in California, is about a group of High School teenagers, most of them still living with their highly dysfunctional middle-class families.

Drugs, sex, and cell phones abound. These characters are portrayed in all their rawness, brutality, and emptiness by an extraordinary cast of young and mature actors.

The highlight of the second season is a play within the show (“Our Lives”), created and directed by one of the students, Lexi, who seems to act as the moral center of the story. The play – stunning in itself for us, the home audience – helps the characters sitting in the school theater see themselves as they really are, with all their flaws and inconsistencies (rather than the fake personas they try to create and project), therefore stirring strong emotions, and leading to a huge unscripted fight on the stage. “Art should be dangerous”, says an assistant to the devastated director to soothe her. But the show must go on.

Most of the relevant current themes are discussed in Euphoria, to some extent: friendship, loyalty, love, the opioid crisis, fluid sexuality, transsexualism, pedophilia, toxic masculinity, feminism, sexual orientation, the breakdown of the traditional family and its values, the difficulty to communicate real feelings or develop an authentic personality.

There’s a lot of physical and verbal violence too. Keeping in mind that the objective of ambitious shows is not only to entertain but also to discuss controversial issues and provoke change, Euphoria is a great show, if you can manage to watch the frequent uncomfortable scenes.

Have you had a chance to watch the show? Please leave your comments in the section below.

Jorge Sette