Gry rodzinne

Summary

Family Secrets is a sophisticated ensemble story that exceeds dramatic comedy, combining it with other genres and exhibiting a very ingenious narrative structure, with twists and turns in time combined with changes in point of view that permanently redefine certain situations and the motivations of its characters.

Review

A wedding is constantly interrupted by the hesitations of the future spouses and the interference of their relatives.

For some time now, the series show a certain concern to get out of the chronologically linear stories. Family Secrets is a choral story with skilfully alternate roles that successfully combines their comings and goings in time with a change in point of view, with a return to the same situations but from the perspective of a different character. This adds information about what is happening and the motivations of the characters and modifies its meaning (for the viewer and for the characters), also playing with ambiguity and misunderstanding.

In essence, the series unravels the intricate relationship between the bride and groom and their respective families (the Wilskas and the Jaworowicz). To do this, he also resorts to another constant in modern series: the combination of genres. Family Secrets exceeds the dramatic comedy, since in addition to displaying that dry Polish humor it can (and knows how to) get very serious and quite dark, venturing into noir, going through the comedy of intrigues and the romantic comedy.

As usually happens with these series, and for all these reasons, it takes a while to get into its dynamic (something that also happens with The White Lotus, for example); but sooner or later empathy begins with its great gallery of characters with their respective registers (each one will have their favorites; in my case, Dorota, by Edyta Olszówka), without prejudice to our perception of them changing with time. The running of the chapters in some cases. This goes hand in hand with a great cast, including Eliza Rycembel (Corpus Christi) as the bride and Bartosz Gelner as the groom.

The series sharply focuses on marriage, fidelity, generational conflicts and, tangentially, class conflicts and is quite harsh with the medical and academic world.

Hilarious at first, very dissfunctional families with interesting plot mixing, but the closer to end you get, the more dissappinting it is. Not worth investing your time.

This series is set in Poland, Warsaw (mostly) with interesting settings, albeit everyone seems to be quite rich :-) Actors are playing well and technically it is very well made including sound and music. Polish productions are often lacking in sound quality (especially dialogs), but this one is actually impressive.

If the screenwriter(s) and director have done a good job with the final episodes, it would be a much different review (at least 7 out of 10). Maybe not Game of Thrones bad, but makes you feel you have lost time put into learning the story.

... it's kinda like you really don't like any of them, they're all annoying, doing stupid, dumb things that most anyone would not be doing... engaging in behaviors Trumplike with abandon, and hating each other over and over again for most any-all of it... is it done well.. yes, overly-repetitive (up to couple episodes worth), yet does that make it not worth watching, who knows your call

... wither or not there's going to be any more of it as said, yet to be established.. Next-Episode still showing it as "On-Hiatus"... being on Netflix there's good numbers have a shot at watching, yet IMDb's still recording less than eight-hundred ratings, with an overall score of near '6', written-reviews-mixed, so that's not terrible, but if it's enough for another season's Y2bD.

Seriously? They made long eight episodes with all these uncountable flashbacks to give us nothing in the very end?

The idea of telling story about an neverending wedding day when two unhappy people who even don't love each other and have a very complicated history of the last eight months cannot get married is not bad at all. But not in eight episodes. Not these more and more story plots and characters.

Three or four compact episodes with less characters and with cancelled unnecessary comedy elements and added more developed drama, then it would be excellent. Now it looks like silly soap opera, unfortunately.

This is one of the best miniseries I've seen lately, it manages brilliantly to keep the interest, the suspense, there's a surprise at every corner. Family and couples, all intertwined in an entertaining way.

Mostly a comedy, but with lots of the drama that comes always with the family theme; then we have almost a thriller at times, a sense of danger, but there's constantly a good feeling about the characters and their struggles, a hope that it will all be fine.

And that wedding...it seems that it will never happen, all kind of elements show up and interrupt, like a neverending story....there's something strange in the air, besides love.