Russian Doll 2: from Groundhog Day to the Multiverse of Madness

Russian Doll 2

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The first season of Russian Doll was an esoteric parable, the Groundhog Day of a woman trapped in an infinite loop that forced her to relive the day of his own death. The second season, from 20 April on Netflix, arrives bringing with it a certain surprise: Nadia and Alan, another victim of that maddening daily cycle, had managed to save each other and break the hallucinating and hallucinatory situation in which Leslye Headland, the comedian Amy Poehler and Natasha Lyonne - interpreter and co-creator of the series - had kicked them out. Russian Doll proved to be a perfect show, the psychedelic journey of a woman with a messed up present and a past full of unresolved traumas, forced to atone in the strangest way possible for her selfishness and irresponsibility. In a way that we will try to explain the second season is even better. It would have made no sense to send Nadia back, a rambling, stoned, sarcastic software programmer, but also cultured, sharp and comic in the loop that she had blocked her on her thirty-sixth birthday.

Chloe Sevigny in Russian Doll 2 Netflix Nadia, however, is still an unsolved, unstable woman obsessed with a past that has chaotically determined her future in ways she cannot accept. This time she persuades herself - rightly - that her life is a mess because of the dysfunctional family. The unfathomable fate that had governed the protagonist's lysergic adventures in the first season this time transforms her from a pawn into a queen: Russian Doll's tawny-haired heroine, and her male analogue Alan, can move back and forth in time. , back and forth in space, in different times and places: from Groundhog Day to the Multiverse of madness. Thus Nadia discovers the mysteries of the family past, jumps in 1982 to get a taste of her mother's (Chloe Sevigny) crushed existence and further back in Hungary invaded by the Nazis, receiving a glimpse of her grandmother's experience. Nadia goes on a hunt for a treasure that could change her life, jumping from one era to another and from one set to another reconstructed with evocative mastery.

Natasha Lyonne and Anne Murphy in Russian Doll 2 Netflix However, Russian Doll is not a hard sci-fi series, it is not the chronicle of the adventures of Doctor Who; Nadia's journey is metaphysical, it is interior, it is a trip that in surreal and disordered ways should lead her towards personal acceptance. Which inevitably passes through a complicated, painful and upset process that must - or rather, would like - to make her peace with the resentment harbored towards the female figures - too absent, too overbearing - that determined her existence. On her path, Nadia is destined to meet the figures of her mother's past, literally experiencing how and why the parent became the interrupted girl who abandoned her. The increasingly weirdo Sharlto Copley of District 9 and Hardcore !, carves out the grotesque role of a mustachioed, horny and ridiculous lover, while Chloe Sevigny that of Nadia's derelict single mother; Schitt's Creek's Annie Murphy plays family friend Ruth as a young man, and her '80s version is a fascinating mix of loneliness, loyalty and strength.

Sharlto Copley and Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll 2 Netflix The fulcrum of everything remains her, Nadia, embodied again by a Lyonne praised by all for her acting performance but who - without detracting from her talent - in our opinion makes very little effort to dress her. Wrapped in the overcoat of a creature of the night in whose pockets he always sinks his hands, the flamboyant and rebellious hair that frames the distorted face with the slightly smudged make-up, the hoarse voice, the brash stride, the nervous gestures: Nadia is supercool and is even more in this second season. The mix of cynicism, sarcasm, anger, melancholy and madness of Nadia who is dissatisfied, angry, alone, fierce and too intelligent to live peacefully form the ego of a spectacular character. The ending of Russian Doll, a delusional trip of universes that intersect and overlap until the entropic collapse of reality and the psyche, is the most leap you will ever see. In fact it will probably never happen again, so don't miss Russian Doll.