The Laudromat, Netflix exposes

The Laudromat is the new movie produced by Netflix, screened to the 76ª Mostra del Cinema of Venice the last september. It will be even shown to the Toronto Film Festival and to the International Cinema Festival in San Sebastián. The movie was even released in the american cinemas right after the debut in Venice. From the 18th of October it’s even possible to see it streaming, on the platform Netflix.

The case Panama Papers and The Laudromat

The documents of the dossier known as Panama Papers were still warm when the idea of making a movie was born. It dates back infact to the 2015 the scandal where it’s been published thousands of private documents of many companies of members of global organisations and public officials. The collected datas go back in the years until the first months of the 1970.

Scott Z. Burns and his parteners didn’t lose the opportunity of the story, which is focused on a so important scandal. The movie is directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns, takes inspiration by the book Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite. To write this book-expose was the journalist Jake Berstein, prize Pulitzer for the investigative journalism right for this book.

The story

The movie tells a fictionalized story of how the widow Elle Martin (Meryl Streep) starts to investigate about the insurance fraud by following two partners: Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonserca (played respectively by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas) which are able to manipulate the global financial system. And so Ellen finds out up to 11 million of private documents of the law office of Panama Mossack Fonserca and how these documents contain sensitive datas of up to 214.000 companies offshore.

These datas were then published first to the Süddeutsche Zeitung and then to the International Consortium of the Investigative Journalists. The story is told through mini stories in the story and the sequence of events is marked by chapters. This to try to explain a really complex argument because it talks about very different cases. The Laudromat uses a funny and unfair style, which winks to the dark comedy: Mossack and Fonserca will deal many stories with irony and black humour. Inside the cast besides the already mentioned Meryl  Streep there are even Jeffrey Wright, Matthias Schoenaerts, James Cromwell and Sharon Stone in the shoes of a realtor.

The expose of the real Mossack e Fonserca

We promptly understand why the real company Mossack Fonserca, in the last months, run for cover accusing of defamation the production company of Netflix. The request for the judge of the company was the one to stop the broadcast of the movie on the famous streaming platform.

Stop that though didn’t happen yet, the movie is available and visible in many countries. So it’s still possible to see the movie where Mossack and Fonserca are played by Oldman and Banderas as “lawyers unscrupulous and without scruple, involved in story of money laundering, tax evasion, corruption and other criminal actions” these at least are the words of the defamation suit presented by Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonserca.

The partners started the cause because the process for the Panama Papers is still on going. What they are afraid about is that those representation of the events can affect the jury negativelly. Especially because in the movie there is a connection with the money laundering, besides to the fact to be linked to the death of twenty one people (accident that in the movie takes place in the first scenes).

Netflix at the moment doesn’t answer to the attack and it leaves the movie available for the audience until further notice.

This post is also available in: Italiano