9/10/2023 0 Comments Charles sobhraj poison of choiceThere should have been more of this richness in Charles’s relationship with Coleman’s Monique, a woman depicted as a gaslit, manipulated, but secretly thrilled companion to her sexy murderous lover. The psychological element of Charles’ manipulation comes through in Nadine’s story Warnier and Rahim make the most of her fear and his charismatic power. Unlike Knippenberg, who despite his years of dedication to the case never met Sobhraj, Nadine and a more reluctant Remi become undercover operatives-collecting evidence, taking photographs, and using some of Charles’s own methods to help Dominique. The pair have been gently poisoning Dominique-enough to make him too sick to travel, but healthy enough to do their housework. Things finally click into place when the begins to center on Nadine Gires ( Mathilde Warnier), a French expat in Thailand who thinks of Charles as a friend until she and her husband Remi (Grégoire Isvarine) discover the plight of Charles and Monique’s live-in guest and housecleaner, Dominique Renelleau ( Fabian Frankel). The first few episodes are a disorienting mash of sick hippies, dim interiors, stiff meetings about gems, and Jenna Coleman looking increasingly concerned. (A notorious escape artist, Sobhraj also eluded the clutches of multiple prisons throughout Asia-escapades the series chooses not to dramatize.) ![]() The show follows a pair of shapeshifting criminals with multiple aliases there’s no need to make things messier by following something like a dozen timelines, skipping backwards and forwards to paint a portrait of a man that still, by the end of eight episodes-by the show’s own admission, in the epilogue text!-eludes their understanding. The device is clunky and tiresome moreover, it’s confusing. The Serpent does a lot of prancing around to make itself quote-unquote suspenseful, using chyrons that attempt a digital version of the iconic split-flap displays that used to be commonplace, complete with the clicky noise that accompanied an update. There’s nothing human to latch onto in Sobhraj he’s just a bad man, slippery under his gaze, nauseatingly ruthless. Who these people were, and what they sought in Asia, remains secondary to the question of Sobhraj himself-which sucks, because he’s awful. The series carries on as if the Asian Hippie Trail is something you will know about already-an overland route, now defunct thanks to the regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, by which Europeans could hitchhike or bus their way through the Khyber Pass to India and points beyond. The result is a show that at worst plays into notions of the sinister, exotique Orient and, at best transforms a subcontinent of incredible history and tradition into a playground for white people., The Serpent does its best to say as little as possible, while cobbling together a collection of impressions and moods around Sobhraj and his accomplices. The characters are blurry and formless the story is chopped up into multiple interleaving timelines and the extraordinary context of the killings-the hippie moment, open borders, the excitement of “the east” to white travelers, the discomfort of their tourism through impoverished countries-is relegated to background scenery. (Other locations, like Kathmandu, Hong Kong, and Delhi, were constructed using Bangkok locations and studio shots back in the UK.) The show fully commits to the vibe of long cigarettes, aviator sunglasses and rapidly spoken French, which may have you folding laundry while saying things like, Est-ce que Charles est un meutrier? Quelle horror! J’ai besoin de mille cigarettes! Alors, où sont mes lunettes d’aviateur?īy the end of this BBC/Netflix co-production, though, I found myself frustrated by how imprecise the series is, even in the midst of such rich material-a bludgeon of a show, albeit a bludgeon with expensive production values. ![]() But the series picks up momentum as it goes, bringing the viewer to staggeringly beautiful but run-down cityscapes, lush vegetation, and deserted beaches in and around Bangkok, where The Serpent did the bulk of its on-location filming. ![]() In this case, the plotting is incomprehensible-especially at the beginning-and the lead performances are exercises in camp. It can be strange when TV tells us our history. The latest example of this maxim is The Serpent, an eight-part limited series about the serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who targeted white travelers throughout South and Southeast Asia in the mid- to late ‘70s. As Herodotus famously wrote, history is merely matériel for a future Netflix series.
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