Does 'Adolescence' fall into the same evil it warns about?

There have been few on-screen performances more impactful than Tim Roth's when he made his television production debut. Made in Britain (1982), by Alan Clarke. The film opens with a close-up of the actor, who has a swastika painted on his forehead and a defiant stare as he walks toward the court where he will be tried for a racist attack. The camera follows him in a long shot punctuated by a punk theme that injects an unavoidable aggressiveness into the scene. Made in Britain It is part of the tradition of a British television model that turned the audiovisual media into a territory of confrontation of the country's social conflicts, a tradition that includes Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, and also Clarke, perhaps the most daring of all.

In Made in England The tendency of some British minors to embrace extremist violence as a response to widespread discontent was already evident. The film didn't attempt to justify the protagonist, but made it clear that the system exacerbated, rather than resolved, the situation. Made in England It was the film in which Clarke discovered the potential of Steadicam to create sequence shots, a mastery that would be taken to the maximum expression Elephant (1989), his view of the Troubles in Ireland. The emergence of the Steadicam In the mid-seventies, the use of the sequence shot increased, but also partly changed its original meaning: that of the commitment to an unmanipulated representation of reality, as defended by the theorist André Bazin.

The series Adolescence has reactivated the conversation around the single sequence shot as the star resource of the staging. By adopting it, the series' creators aim to inscribe themselves both in the social tradition of British television and in the Bazinian conception that identifies this resource as the most reliable in real-world experience. All this is to place at the center of the debate one of those well-known but little-discussed problems: the loss of control, by adults, over minors intoxicated by discourses that normalize violence against women. Adolescence It didn't originate from the BBC or Channel 4, but from Netflix, where it has managed to distinguish itself largely thanks to this technical choice, which has become a highly effective selling point. The creators were clear that the single sequence shot also carries an aura of prestige today, a demonstration of virtuosity that would certify the quality of the product.

The point is, given the series, the sequence shots in which each of the four episodes unfold are not as differentiating as we expected from the purposeless stagings that are common on Netflix. The continuous camera movement helps keep the audience engaged, and the choreography of events is often used to serve the production, rather than the other way around. Despite the undeniable realistic vocation of Adolescence, its main strategy responds to exhibitionism rather than transparency. Not only that of the director, but also to the exhibitionism of the performers, especially Stephen Graham, who reserves the final show of the performance for himself. This is where the proposal falters most: Adolescence It's the umpteenth narrative in which a woman is killed, and another minor is the killer, but the victim we should pity is an adult man. Perhaps the series ends up falling into the same error it warns about: not paying enough attention to the adolescence that is supposed to concern us so much.