Heaven Can Weigh: a review of Nobody’s Looking
Creators: Carolina Markowicz, Teodoro Poppovic, Daniel Rezende and a hamster in a wheel
Fred: Augusto Madeira
Uli: Victor Lamoglia Picture
Miriam: Thati Lopes
Greta: Júlia Rabello
Chun: Danilo de Moura
A favorite genre is tales about the afterlife, in which the afterlife falls short of expectations. A popular subgenre portrays Heaven as a sort of seedy bureaucracy, ridden with middle management and where the happless angelic peons follow bizarre rules and regulations to an unknown (ineffable) purpose. Think Beetlejuice, Dead Like Me, or most recently, Good Omens.
The bad news is that it gets done a lot. The good news is that it usually works out pretty well.
Nobody’s Looking is a Brazilian effort by the vaunted director Daniel Rezende (City of God, Robocop), an eight part half-hour series for Netflix.
In this iteration, you have “angeli” (singular is angelus) who are tasked at being guardian angels for people. The angeli are interesting critters: human in form, they all wear white shirts, black slacks, and red ties. They all have red hair. If the ties and hair were brown or black, you would expect them to turn up on your porch, asking if you’ve heard the good news and passing out pamphlets. Except these guys (and gals, unlike regular angels they have sexes, and it turns out, sex) have cute little wings on their backs.
They are headquartered in a big drafty office, a nightmare of desks, adding machines and rubber stamps, and a large bingo ball delivery device that issues Daily Action Orders (DAOs) to the angeli telling them what humans they are to safeguard that particular day. They’ve all been doing this every day for some eight thousand years. The are overwatched by Fred, an ineffectual oaf who would be well meaning if it weren’t for his need to impose his authority at every turn. He means well, but he’s a shite boss. You know the type.
There are four rules that Fred jealously guards: 1. Obey your DAO. 2. Do not allow yourself to be visible to humans. 3. Don’t mess with any human not named in your DAO. 4. Never go in the Chief’s office. The Chief, who nobody has ever seen, is assumed to the the Big Guy, the Am That I Am, Jo the Great, His Ineffableness.
One day, for the first time in 8,000 years, a new Angelus comes to Fred’s office. He is Ulisses (Uli) and he is wet behind the wings and needs training. He is assigned two angeli (Greta and Chun) to take the new kid in tow. Eight thousand years and they’ve never had to train anyone, so they’re kind of confused. It doesn’t help that the new kid is intelligent and willful. He asks questions like, “If humans can’t see us, why do we need to wear ties?”
By the end of the second episode he’s broken all four of the rules, and is facing the ultimate penalty—being forced to watch City of Angels with Nicholas Cage for the rest of eternity. And he’s blown up the lives of several humans in the process, in various hilarious ways.
Once in the Chief’s office, Uli discovers that the “chief” is a Rube Goldberg device that feeds the bingo balls to Fred’s domain, and the guiding force is a hamster in a wheel. Uli manages to accidentally injure the hamster, bringing heaven to a grinding halt.
It starts out a bit limp and formulaic, but stay with it. For one thing, it is Brazilian, so it doesn’t follow standard North American story-telling modes. That gives it a fresh approach. The characters develop, in fairly unexpected ways. The humor gets sharper, and a bit darker as it goes along. The English is both dubbed and subtitled, and have huge discrepancies, something which normally annoys the hell out of me, but by the second episode I realized the wild diversions between spoken and written dialog was deliberate, and funny as hell.
A second season seems likely, especially since it ends on a very strong “to be continued” note.
Now on Netflix.