It is common for adaptations of successful books to a short series or movie to disappoint their readers: it is impossible to capture in a few hours all the complexity of a story told in hundreds of pages. In case of The light that you can’t see, Based on the novel by Anthony Doerr set in World War II that won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2015, it is paradigmatic of the style that abounds on Netflix. The four-episode miniseries is well made but lacks substance. It is impeccable in the production, the aesthetics, the settings. But the characters lack depth.
That’s great but to the series created by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), which, despite everything, can be seen. Against the many-year journey of the novel, this production begins in the final stretch, in the photogenic city of Saint-Malo, Brittany, in the north of Nazi-occupied France, awaiting the Normandy landings. And he tells us the past through flashbacks. That doesn’t work badly at all. What is left over is Manichaeism. The Nazis are cruel and evil all the time, even when they are in their free time or with their families, except one who is good, an orphan boy forcibly recruited for his technical skills (Louis Hofmann).
The good and great protagonist is a blind French girl (well played by Aria Mia Loberti and Nell Sutton, both blind, at different ages), as heroic as her father and uncle. There is tenderness, yes, around the character of the girl and then young Marie-Laure LeBlanc, although at times she overuses sentimentality. That all the dialogues are in English (and not in French or German depending on who and when) makes the story less credible. This made it easier for the big voice of the very British Hugh Laurie to pass for French.
Marie-Laure’s story highlights her ability to overcome her visual dysfunction in the midst of the most horrible context possible: she is intelligent, she knows how to find solutions to everything. The argument has something more exciting, even today but especially for that generation: the power of the radio. What unites the blind girl and the good Nazi throughout the entire story is her passion for shortwave broadcasts. They both listened to those of a mysterious French professor; She will get on the microphone later.
A little context: at that time radio was not only the mass media par excellence. Furthermore, it did not respect borders, because shortwave emissions were followed thousands of kilometers away. The Spaniards who lived through the Civil War felt the same way regarding this access to different voices from around the world as these characters involved in the Second World War. Even more: radio amateurs might broadcast their own content, which today would be uploading a podcast.
So, in the midst of the horror of war, two protagonists who do not know each other and remain distant will find comfort in the same warm voice that speaks to them in privacy: that magic is still maintained by the radio. And in war it was also a weapon: it was used to send coded messages from the resistance or Allied espionage, and the Nazis persecuted with all their harshness anyone who broadcast on their own. Then radio became something closer and more local, with the transition to medium wave first and frequency modulation later. But just as then it keeps you company like no other medium can hope to do. The new generations, tormented or not, seek that same connection in youtubers, podcasters, instagramers, tiktokers o twitchers. We still need someone to talk to us.
There is another parallel plot, the search for a valuable diamond taken from a museum, which in this format is secondary and dispensable. All defects can be noticed The light you can’t see and still have a good time with her. It’s a nice story, what the hell, it might have been told better.
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