« The Casablanca cocaine » : this is how Chris Brancato described his new series, during its preview broadcast in March at the Séries Mania festival in Lille. Like the cult 1947 film, Hotel Cocaine is located in a very famous nightclub with more illegal underbelly: the Mutiny Hotel, located in Miami. Inspired by a true story, this production, broadcast from this 1is October on OCSreveals the fate of Roman Compte, a Cuban exile full of ambition and leader of a nightclub that hides many secrets.
Above all, do not offer “a giant advertisement for drugs”
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Mutiny became the place where businessmen, politicians, drug traffickers and police officers gathered to consume cocaine galore. Seven years after the box office Narcos on Netflix, Hotel Cocaine dives once again into a world of drugs and illegal trafficking of all kinds, vintage style, to better tell our present, as Chris Brancato explains: “The series allows us to examine issues that are still very topical like immigration, the division between countries or people who struggle to make money as immigrants. We explore today’s themes through the prism of the past. »
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The showrunner especially did not want to makeHotel Cocaine a “giant drug ad”but rather show that “each of these pleasures involves pain and suffering”. Danny Pino, seen in Cold Case and who plays Roman Compte, agrees: “We wanted to answer a crucial question: who paid the price to maintain this permanent party atmosphere that we found at Mutiny? »
An immersion that begins with “the costumes”
Behind the glitter of nightlife there were indeed darker clandestine affairs than Hotel Cocaine aims to reveal. Unfortunately, despite all the visible efforts on the part of the writers and the artistic team to bring the Mutiny back to life, the eight episodes of the series fall a little flat. The fault lies in the length which tarnishes the whole, but also in the somewhat Manichean female characters, evolving in a world of frankly unlikable men.
It still remains a stunning reconstruction of Miami in the 1970s, which begins with the costumes for Danny Pino: “It shapes us, as actors, allowing us to find our gestures or our way of holding ourselves. For the spectator, it is also a crucial aspect, with the decorations, since it was necessary to ensure that the Mutiny stood out from other clubs of the same era. » A very successful immersion indeed, which will however not commit us to new seasons of the series, already imagined by Chris Brancato.
Broadcast from Tuesday October 1, 2024, at 8:50 p.m., on OCS. Two episodes each evening. Also available on demand on MyCanal.
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