THE TRIAL — Netflix does a new take on PERSPECTIVE
The Italian architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, is best known for designing the dome of the Duomo in Florence, but he was also a talented artist. In 1415, he is said to have discovered (or some say re-discovered) the principles of linear perspective, an artistic device that creates the illusion of space by depicting converging parallel lines.
Until the Renaissance in Italy, paintings generally lacked perspective — think of the flat images on Greek vases and urns — fascinating but two-dimensional renderings. Consider Italian Gothic Art — beautiful and intricate but completely flat. Once it was “discovered”, however, the principals of perspective were ardently applied by numerous Renaissance artists and many artists into the future.
In fact by now, in the West, we take perspective for granted. We normally see things from one point of view. In some novels, perspective or point of view jumps around from chapter to chapter (think Olive Kittredge) but only rarely in film.
One of the clearest and most obvious examples of how perspective works in movies is the courtroom drama. There are two sides of a courtroom: the prosecution and and the defense. Occasionally, the story is told from the point of view of the prosecutor attempting to find a defendant “guilty.” Far more often, the perspective is from the side of the defending attorney who’s attempting to vindicate his or her client. Perry Mason glares across the aisle at the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger. Won’t Hamilton ever get it right? The answer is no, he won’t — not ever. With Mason’s superior insight, not to mention the efforts of his intrepid investigator, Paul Drake, the defense always triumphs.
Ditto A Few Good Men or, my all-time favorite, The Verdict. Even in To Kill a Mockingbird — despite the jury’s verdict, we know that the true victor was the attorney — Gregory Peck, oh no, I mean, Atticus Finch.
But what if the perspective switches in the middle of the drama. What if you see how things unfold from the prosecutor’s point of view and then suddenly that perspective reverses and you see the same set of circumstances from the defending attorney’s point of view. And what if, in the course of 8 episodes, the perspective keeps shifting — back and forth, back and forth, so you truly don’t know who or what to believe or to care about.
That’s what happens in the current Netflix drama from Italy, The Trial. We start out feeling we’re on firm footing — we follow a tough female prosecutor, Elena Guerra, as she’s called to the scene of a murdered girl. Very soon she’s tracking down the probable (or at least possible) culprit. And as in similar dramas, her obsessive passion to find the girl’s killer is based on deep and hidden personal reasons. Nonetheless, we want her to get it right, to nail the killer — until we encounter her formidable and equally attractive opponent on the other side of the room — the tough yet seemingly honest, Ruggero Barone. We even grow to appreciate and often believe the woman he’s defending (and apparently falling in love with), Linda Monaco, who is not only wealthy and beautiful but molto simpatica. In this suspenseful drama, may think you know what’s happening as you follow every twist and turn and as each new witness produces unexpected testimony — and yet in the last 5 minutes of the final episode — you still may be surprised.
We can rejoice that Netflix is committing so much of its largess to programming from other countries like Italy. For the past million years or so, the United States, in general, and Hollywood, in particular, has dominated the creation and distribution of movies. That means that the American perspective — whether portrayed through drama, romance, sci-fi, adventure, animation, fantasy or comedy — permeated the world. It dominated world culture. And it may have created in the minds of many Americans the perception that only one viewpoint truly existed — the American perspective — our way of doing things, our way of seeing the world.
Finally that’s shifting. As we sit comfortably at home watching our big screens, we see productions by talented filmmakers from Spain, Brazil, Germany, Denmark, and Poland. And Netflix is in the process of delving into new markets — Asia, Africa, the Middle East. Some of the productions are for local consumption but a substantial share find their way to our screens, into our American homes. How exciting! How provocative! How transformative! Now we have the opportunity to see the world through the lens of other cultures. We see how other people (often people very far from our radar like Israeli Hassidic Jews or African immigrants in migrant camps) view humanity, politics, culture, children, gender. romance, humor. This increased in-put, not only enables us to learn about others, it helps us understand ourselves better. It contributes to our shared humanity — the biggest task, in my view, that confronts us today.
A cinematic ploy in The Trial draws attention to the very act of perspective by insinuating Anna, the persistent prosecutor, or Ruggero, the diligent attorney, into the unfolding dramatization of testimony as one witness after another recalls what he or she saw and heard the night of the murder. Through the eyes of the characters we observe, in Brunelleschi mode, as these multiple observations of the past eventually converge and give us a version of the truth. ###
