The producer A24 has been on a good streak for a few years in the cinema: in less than a decade it has obtained fifty Oscar nominations and, in fact, has already won a pair of statuettes for best film, for ‘Moonlight’ in 2017 and for ‘Everything at the same time everywhere’ this same year. But one cannot underestimate his good nose for series: first it was ‘Ramy’ (with ‘Mo’ as a sister series), then ‘Euphoria’ and now ‘Bronca’, a kind of instant classic destined to occupy high positions in future summaries of the best of 2023 and which emerged as a winner among miniseries with three Golden Globes: it won the award for best miniseries, best actress for Ali Wong and best actor for Steven Yeun.
Although it may seem like a lie, it is the first series created by Lee Sung Jin, screenwriter of South Korean origin with experience in ‘Bloody Girls’, ‘Silicon Valley’ or ‘Dave’. Starting from a seemingly light anecdote, Lee manages to put together a series as agile as it is complex and dense in nuances, at the same time action black comedy, overwhelming drama, chronicle in chiaroscuro of the Asian-American experience, analysis of class anxieties and place where you can have a perfect time with broken characters.
The fight in the title, which would rather be a fight, confronts two characters who are in different life situations, but who agree in their anxiety about money issues and a dissatisfaction between justified and indecipherable. On one side is Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), an independent contractor in the throes of depression, partly as a result of his parents’ forced return to Korea, for which he believes himself guilty. On the other, Amy Liu (Ali Wong), a businesswoman with a Chinese father and Vietnamese mother who may be about to sell her houseplant business for ten million dollars. That would allow her to spend more time with her perfect husband George (Joseph Lee) and her perfect daughter June (Remy Holt) in that house perfectly redesigned by herself. But she doesn’t seem ecstatic about the prospect.
At the beginning of the series, Danny and Amy have a car collision in a parking lot that turns first into a chase through the streets of Los Angeles and then into a long-distance crash with increasingly unpredictable mutual moves, and in which both end up entangling, sometimes more directly than others, members of their respective families or people from their closest work environment, all of them characters to whom Lee knows how to give a own relief, a complex humanity.
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The cast is always up to par. the double challenges proposed by Lee: to shine both in the most physical action and in sequences of pure emotional catharsis (Yeun on his return to church or Wong trying to express his pain to the most unexpected person); being both a cartoon and the most fragile person in the world; break us out laughing making the most abrupt gesture and defeat us by the squad with some subtlety of nuance. It’s hard to know what kind of scene will come after another or what kind of strange twists and turns the plot will take. That feeling of uncertainty is stimulating.
The least surprising thing about ‘Bronca’, taking into account that we are talking about A24, is the care taken in its aesthetics at all levels. The team is almost like an ‘all-stars’ of the studio: Grace Yun He is in charge, as in ‘The Reverend (First Reformed)’ or ‘Hereditary’, of the production design; Larkin Seiple signs the photograph, as in ‘Everything at once everywhere’, and Bobby Krlic, also known as The Haxan Cloak, looks for sometimes playful music after terrifying in ‘Midsommar’. With people like that it was always going to be difficult to talk about disappointment.