Watched all episodes (51?) in all five seasons of Spain's Money Heist (Lacasa de papel). Gripping and suspenseful and full of surprises, the viewer has no choice but to sit back and expect the unexpected. Exposition and characterization are spread throughout the length of the movie all the way to the end, so that the viewer is incapable of making up his mind about the characters and projecting himself ten steps ahead of the story. It succeeds because, unbeknownst even to their creators, the technique is that employed by the Russian master Leo Tolstoy, and, to a certain extent, that of Boris Pasternak. That, and because the direction, cinematography, casting, and performances are excellent, showing us shot after breathtaking shot with creative angles and lighting, and the equally creative development of relationships. I also know that is extremely difficult to shoot scenes involving fire and pouring rain, and there were quite a few of them.

Sometimes interest in the plot is sustained by means of introducing complications that the characters must then immediately resolve. Wherever that is not enough to keep one's attention from flagging, nudity and sexual tension are made to take over. Unfortunately many of the scenes were redundant and were mere variations of previous scenes, making the story move two steps forward and then one step backward. This is an apparently laid-back though very expensive production, but gets long-drawn and tedious after Episode 13. Things start hopping again--and intensely--in Episode 20. That being said, the second season has a magnificent ending. As for the third, rather than function as an epilogue it brings the viewer back to Square One. It became too much of a good thing. The fourth and fifth seasons pick to a satisfying climax and denouement.

It was rather disturbing to me that the dialogue was peppered with very anti-feminist curse words and phrases such as "puta", "cono", and "la madre que te pario". Of course there was also the non-sexist "mierda", the equivalent of the American and British "shit" that students of Catholic universities have taken on as a favorite expression. Movies, indeed, influence audiences: the first thing they influence is language. I remember all too clearly how audiences kept saying "Shit" after viewing the 1976 movie Carrie. That is how the word conquered the Philippines some forty years ago. But how do we tell people that they shit because they keep stuffing their mouths with all kinds of food and drink? Shouldn't "food" then be used as a curse word as well? All these verbal obscenities convince me that no country is a Catholic country. After all, it is what comes out of people's hearts and mouths, with our without reference to what comes out of their anuses, that reflects what their religion is. 

The series, however, does preach three, twenty-first century truths: 

--for any urban setting to be paradise, it is money that must flow like milk and honey, and, despite others' poetic mooning and crooning about love and light, it is a truth that is always all too easy to prove. Movies and beautiful faces can be tedious and boring, but money never is, and never will be. 

--there is nothing as decadent as bureaucracy, and it is the clever and the creative who will bring it down. The only cheap trick I found, however, was comprising the band of heisters of "social outcasts" verging on stereotypes, but that might have been done merely to gain the audience's sympathy.

--in real life, everybody wins.