The Laun­dro­mat

If there’s one thing that direc­tor Stephen Soder­bergh loves, it’s using cin­e­ma as a way to chart glob­al eco­nom­ic frame­works. The flow of cap­i­tal is real­ly some­thing he digs hard, and that shouldn’t real­ly be a sur­prise con­sid­er­ing he’s some­thing of a gen­tle­man genius when it comes to illus­trat­ing how mon­ey with­in the movie industry.

The Laun­dro­mat is his response to the rev­e­la­tions of the Pana­ma Papers, a 2015 info dump which revealed the names of investors from across the globe (some of whom are well known movie mak­ers) who chose to employ off-shore account­ing meth­ods as a way to avoid pay­ing tax. It’s not a doc­u­men­tary, but a patch­work of fic­tion­alised com­ic vignettes each claim­ing to reveal a ​“secret” about the under­hand prac­tices employed by the bank­ing sec­tor. It is based on the non-fic­tion inves­tiga­tive book ​‘Secre­cy World’ by Jake Bernstein.

With its fourth wall break­ing address­es and attempts to con­tex­tu­alise the scan­dal through colour­ful visu­al data, some might spy echoes of Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short, a work which also looks at peo­ple get­ting filthy rich from gam­ing the sys­tem by manip­u­lat­ing tax loop­holes. But this might have a bit more in com­mon with late Luis Buñuel, films such as The Phan­tom of Lib­er­ty or The Dis­creet Charm of the Bour­geoisie, which are opu­lent and iron­ic satires that ask us to laugh through the tears as wealthy aris­tos walk between the rain­drops of decen­cy and shield their eyes from the suf­fer­ing below.

Mega dodgy Pana­man­ian law firm Mos­sack Fon­se­ca were the com­pa­ny at the cen­tre of it all, and its lead part­ners are here played by Gary Old­man (sport­ing a very shaky Ger­man accent as Jür­gen Mos­sack), and Anto­nio Ban­deras (as svelte con­fi­dence man Ramón Fon­se­ca). They are intro­duced in tuxe­dos and clutch­ing cock­tails, as they strut through a pre-his­tor­i­cal scene and help ear­ly man to cre­ate fire by using a ban­knote as kin­dling. They are dev­il­ish and charm­ing, and exude the air of men who are cer­tain of their future safe­ty. They act as the nar­ra­tors to their own down­fall, but the case they put for­ward is that every­thing they did was uneth­i­cal rather than ille­gal, and that makes it per­fect­ly fine.

The film then fans out through var­i­ous anec­dotes and details, as Meryl Streep’s dod­dery wid­ow decides to bur­row down the rab­bit hole of fis­cal vice when her hus­band is killed in a com­mer­cial boat­ing acci­dent and the insur­ance pay-out ends up being insult­ing­ly mea­gre. This con­nects to the sto­ry of a super-rich wom­an­is­ing investor who attempts to buy the silence of his daugh­ter with shares in a shell com­pa­ny, and then a tale about the wife of a Chi­nese busi­ness­man who believes she is is able to oper­ate above the law.

The Laun­dro­mat is a fun ride while you’re on it, but is prob­a­bly a less­er entry into the director’s esteemed per­son­al canon. While the sto­ries all give the world of crooked account­ing a human face, they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly tell us very much that we don’t know already, and the struc­ture is too hap­haz­ard for any of it to real­ly hit home. Cap­i­tal­ism pro­motes unscrupu­lous behav­iour. Shady finan­cial inter­ests make if dif­fi­cult to update tax laws. It’s always the lit­tle man who bears the brunt of all this. Anx­i­ety and depres­sion lead to an inter­est in reli­gion. Reli­gion leads to blind­ness when vot­ing for polit­i­cal lead­ers. That’s the spin cycle.

It’s worth men­tion­ing the final shot, which is a love it or leave it prospect, reveal­ing an under­tow of activism and sound­ing a direct plea for change from above. Streep is involved in a long, sin­gle take, and what she does and the way she does it is quite extra­or­di­nary. It’s a mag­nif­i­cent feat of tech­ni­cal act­ing, even if you’re not entire­ly sold on the sub­tle­ty of the message.