‘Euphoria’: bigger, more intense and shot in cinema

Creator and director: Sam Levinson

Distribution: Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi

Country: U.S

Duration: 57 min. (8 episodes; 7 viewed for review)

Year: 2022

Gender: Drama

Premiere: January 10, 2022 (HBO Max)

Larger than life emotions, ecstatic highs and abyssal lows, days of feeling immortal and weeks in which every day seems Sunday: this is how adolescence feels. Under the influence of anxiety and drugs, Rue (Zendaya) can live these feelings in a way even more extreme, But even healthy zoomers feel closely the emotional vertigo from ‘Euphoria’.

Or, why not, also their parents, adolescents themselves in another time. The director and screenwriter Sam Levinson recalls the universality of, for example, the loss in a second season with visits to the past of initially secondary characters, but in reality essential in the formation of character and affective deficiencies of our protagonists, distorted reflections of parents or grandparents.

First stop: the childhood of Fezco (Angus Cloud), Rue’s reluctant camel, or better, the maturity of his grandmother Marie. It is a prologue filmed and edited with the pulse of the Scorsese of ‘One of our own’; such a shameless tribute that it even has Nilsson’s ‘Jump into the fire’ as its soundtrack. After two much talked about hinge episodes, ‘Euphoria’ is consecrated from the start as the most exuberantly cinematic series on television. And as the pure cinema that it aspires to be, it is shot, this time, in cinema.

Nobody’s role models

There are those who craved a Fez origin story, but what most audiences wanted to know is whether Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer) would regain their winning chemistry. Levinson doesn’t keep us waiting. Their relationship also takes a leap, becomes even less platonic, as it is also complicated by the arrival of a third party. Another curious love triangle is the one made up of the sensitive Cassie (extraordinary Sydney Sweeney), the manipulative Nate (Jacob Elordi) and his ex-girlfriend, Maddy (Alexa Demie), who would like to return with the second, although we remember that he was about to kill her by strangling her.

No, it is not the best life lesson, but it is that in ‘Euphoria’, a series of crude sincerity, the characters don’t do what would be best for them, but what they can’t help but do, at least until someone helps them to really see the light. And that moment still seems far away. Rue reaches her lowest moments, at least to date, in a fifth episode where she manages to break the hearts of all her loved ones in record time. There are twelve minutes of discussion of those who make history and promote Emmys. But the restless Levinson does not know how to stay in the same place for long and redirects what seemed glorious melodrama to action cinema not without a good dose of comedy. Anything goes, but only if it’s intense.

In what some will call self-indulgence and others genius (there is a bit of both, actually), Levinson allows himself in these episodes all kinds of transfers between genres, narrative twists and turns or shock tactics of various kinds. Metafiction runs rampant in the third and, above all, fifth episodes, the latter a cross between reality and the series with the play that Lexi (Maude Apatow), Cassie’s little sister, has staged from her own experiences and those of those around him. You walk into an episode of ‘Euphoria’ not knowing what you will see or how you will feel about it. You leave wanting to discuss those feelings with everyone.

At a time when series, due to overabundance, come and go with disturbing speed of the collective consciousnessLevinson seems to have looked for reasons for us to talk about his week by week. In each episode there are plenty of elements, content or formal, for the intense online conversation. And in many of them, songs to stoke the R&B revival of the two thousand. Haven’t we mentioned it yet? That’s right, ‘Euphoria’ still sounds great. Great series for all the senses.