The city is surrounded by moonlight: the ghostly outlines of buildings, signs and cars look much clearer than under the sun. During the day, they smear and blur, the colors are superimposed one on top of the other and everything around them hides behind a dusty veil. And under the moon, excess colors evaporate, and the world becomes sharp and consistent, as if someone had captured it on film.
Private detective John Sugar hides his dark thoughts in the closet of the subconscious to focus on the view outside the window. Fresh water from a sprinkler truck on asphalt — glowing and clear — looks more like ice. John is fascinated by what is happening, as if it were the plot of his favorite movie. He likes “nocturnal pictures” especially much, as they resemble the cinema of the forties.
Hollywood producer Jonathan Siegel recently hired John to bring back his missing granddaughter. Sugar loves Siegel's films, so he was genuinely excited to be able to help. However, the producer kept silent about family secrets, vices and addictions. Without foreseeing a catch, the detective took on the most difficult and exhausting case of his career.
Despite his simultaneously romantic and cynical profession, John did not become embittered and did not turn into an indifferent gentleman in a cape with ambiguous relations with the law and femme fatale. Years of not always well-paid work did not take away kindness, helpfulness and a desire to help, despite our own heap of psychological and physical problems.
Moreover, Sugar is ready to lend a helping hand to both good acquaintances and people who resemble villains. He has an amazing gift for bringing out the best in others, even if it's buried deep within. This makes him an irrelevant, almost alien hero who is foreign to the noir genre, both in its classical and modern forms.
A black suit with a white shirt, a vintage car and a poetic profession are elements of human mimicry and genre literally and figuratively, John's attempt to stick himself into someone's footage. Quentin Tarantino did a similar thing in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, placing Rick Dalton in an era in which he never existed and in films he did not star in.
But Sugar is foreign for another reason as well. A slow story with sudden twists and turns takes place in modern times, but the main character seems to exist in the past: he dresses, behaves and speaks like a collective image of all noir films, drives a popular car half a century ago, reads paper magazines and watches movies on videotapes. It seems to be too analogue and too tangible for the abstract digital world.
The detective's grueling everyday life does not seem to Sugar as a job in the literal sense, but as a stolen life, which can only be seen in the dark hall of the cinema. This echo of the past emphasizes all other inconsistencies in his image and thereby telegraphs: “John is a stranger here, no one knows who he is or where he comes from”.
Mysterious alienation is gradually spreading to the narrative, infecting the script with an alien virus. The plot twist, which reveals John's true essence, is not so shocking, because he draws an almost tangible line in the conflict between the main character and the space surrounding him.
Sugar literally turns out to be an alien from a distant world, with a different skin color and alien physiology. At this point, the twists and turns of a complex investigation and small details lose weight or reach their logical conclusion. The “human” part of “Sugar” ends and begins at the same time.
This twist leads to the main theme of the series — love for cinema and its alien nature. John is a sympathetic viewer who watches different films and enjoys their beauty for the sake of development — as an entity that reflects through others' examples. Alienthood, viewed through the prism of the cinephile experience, does not remove the main character from the viewer watching him, but, on the contrary, brings him closer.
John was fascinated by movies and real life, between which there is little difference. He sees his existence as a collection of scenes from his favorite paintings, periodically featuring works by Orson Welles, Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang. Quotation thinking also characterizes other characters; they just have their own analogies. But this variability does not make communication difficult — thanks to movies, Sugar can find a common language with anyone.
He not only watches others' stories, but also tries to influence them, not realizing that his efforts are unlikely to be beneficial. Screenwriting textbooks teach that the main character must act. John acts even when it's better to stand still. Sugar can save some characters, but only to become part of the editing material for their lives.
The mystery of watching a movie is reminiscent of the primitive state into which a person enters when a burning fire captivates his eyes. This fire is alien and harmful, but at the same time it gives warmth and serves as a source of hypnotic spectacle. Sugar understands this state better than anyone and, together with the viewer, constantly looks at the dancing flames and absorbs the warmth of humanity. Waiting for the last coal to decay.
