A savage satire!

The  Laundromat (Netflix)
Starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas.
Directed by Steven Soderberg

To really understand this clever sassy robust  film you  must understand money. With almost zilch knowledge  of how it works, I could still sense a deep sense of mirthless laughter in  the way the king of quirky  direction  Steven Soderberg (check out his oddball  oeuvre,  from his directorial debut  Sex Lies  & Videotape  to his last  Unsane) plays  around with the grim reality of global money laundering.

In that joyless laughter that this cleverer-than-you-think  film there is  a message. Using  the  financial resources  of  the middleclass to  make the rich, richer,  is not a  laughing matter. But, what can we  do about it in a world that  functions on  inequality and injustice?

Soderberg’s whimsical film on global money laundering could leave  you confused about which side it is talking from. But then you realise which side this film is really on. It pitches its  tone of savagely satirised  rebuke  against  financial  hoaxes at us, the gullible  public which  surrenders its lifetime’s resources to institutions which, we hope against hope, will make good use of our savings.

What happens when  these  institutions let  us down? The Laundromat creates a sense of absurd dread  about  those who play around with public wealth. It  explores the extremely complicated process  of money laundering by breaking it down into  episodes  of  tragic hilarity where we at once see characters  with all their fancy  flamboyance and  frightening frailties.

Lording  over  the vast cast  of  incredible actors  is the supreme Meryl Streep who, as usual, sweeps us into the  deepest  consciousness of her character’s  soul digging out personal and inter-personal  truth about the quality  of life the  working class lives  as opposed to the  rich who are portrayed as  ridiculous in  their  self absorbed  ruthlessness.

There are two very  engrossing, very twisted episodes  in the  eccentric narration, one involving a black tycoon with  fraudulent  money who tries to bribe his daughter  into  keeping mum (pun intended) about his extra-marital fling, and another  where a ruthless Chinese entrepreneur (Rosalind Chao) tries to browbeat  an American financier  into legitimising her scam and then snuffs him off.

The  blend of the sinister and  comic  with a bit of the bizarre thrown in  for good measure is typically Soderbergish. His arching  penchant  for quirky social comment is nowhere  more evident than in his choice of narrators, a couple  of master-launderers played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas  who serve  to distance  the  film’s characters  from us while plunging  them  (the  characters) into  a  game  of  manipulation and fraudulence that boggles the mind.

At  the vortex  of this game of vicious  deception is Streep’s  character of  the bereaved  widow who reminds us that  the meek are far from inheriting the earth, as promised. In the meanwhile there is the  next global scam, hopefully as prone  to  an engaging film as  this one.

And yes, perhaps  after watching this film you may want  to  visit the  Panamas, and you may  never want to  take  a ferry ride again.