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In this apparent satire set in the middle of the 1918 flu, a wealthy bastard journalist hires a new boss who alters the hierarchy of ownership.
By Natalia Winkelman
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The cook, a thief, a woman and her lover – in “Golpe!”, those family actors rub shoulders in an elite restaurant, but at the same time in a beach mansion.
The film, written and directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, is a hard-hitting satire of pandemic-era bourgeois hypocrisy. However, his intended innovation is to position his quarantine thugs a century before Covid, when the pandemic (the 1918 flu) brought familiar waves of business closures, resource shortages, and desperate fears of contagion.
In the midst of those mistakes we meet the liberal journalist Jay (Billy Magnussen), his spouse, Julie (Sarah Gadon), and their two children. The family protects itself from disease on their island farm, where the domestic staff live. They take care of the cooking, cleaning and babysitting. The help appreciates their shelter, until Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard), a new chef from the mainland, suggests that the staff deserves better operating conditions.
The film seeks to pit Jay, a narcissist who pretends to report on the devastated continent while being pampered, against Monk, a manual worker. “Cut!” he exaggerates the difference between men by turning Monk into a swordsman (his dangling earrings evoke Captain Jack Sparrow) and Jay into a pacifist, vegetarian, natural and simple.
As Monk lifts the veil that surrounds the property’s hierarchy, he also castrates Jay before the eyes of the house. This implication that virility triumphs over modesty is, in the midst of an otherwise undeniable comedy, an uncomfortably regressive manner. to tell the story of how other people fight for strength in difficult times.
Coup d’état! Not classified. Duration: 1 hour 38 minutes. In cinemas.
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