‘The Tourist’ travels to Ireland in its second season | Television

From the desert landscapes of the deep south of Australia to the green and deep rural Ireland, a long journey of Elliot and Helen in the hope that the amnesiac protagonist will recover his memory, is at the center of the six episodes of the second season of The tourist.

Rarely has Mies Van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” found a better home in the two seasons of Elliot and Helen’s adventures and misadventures. A minimal Ireland, with scattered houses and farms, shows more violence than one might imagine in those places. Of course, then we remember facts like those of Puerto Hurraco, in Badajoz, and the praise of the village inevitably collapses.

The excellent series created by Harry and Jack Williams, broadcast on HBO Max, transcends the two essential components, violence and beer, framing them in a story of deadly rivalry between two families even if without Romeo and Juliet, as Karina sang. A hatred that has been going on for two generations and in which Elliot finds himself involved shortly after arriving in his native Ireland. Someone in Australia had advised him that perhaps returning to his home country would help him recover his lost memory, as well as escape the cruel persecution of the fat Billy Nixon (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), who, as he intuits, is an adjustment of the accounts for his mafia past.

The action also includes some traits of Greek tragedy and nineteenth-century melodrama which, however, are not excessive and flow with a certain logic. To this we should add a series of colorful secondary characters, such as the local psychopathic policeman, Elliot’s mother and matriarch of the clan or the patriarch of the rival family, characters that allow us to distance ourselves from the heartthrob and the lady played by wonderful actors in a little-known Ireland in which it is demonstrated that the passions unleashed are universal.

Nothing to do with Furies, the French series created by Jean-Yves Arnaud and Yoann Legave (Netflix) in which the violence is constant and the plot that tries to justify it is banal. It offers an immersion in a hypothetical Parisian underground world where two courageous women wander, giving and receiving incredible beatings. It is not known whether this preponderance of female roles is the result of a misunderstanding of Me Too or the frivolity of some screenwriters who only aspire to épater les bourgeois.

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