Directed by Giulia Gandini, Frauds is the story of two conwomen who decide to join hands one last time and plan the final heist of their career. More than the heist, what worked for me in the series was the flawed characters, who were all very convincing, and they left a lasting impact with their performances. Frauds is one of the better crime/heist thrillers created this year, and I urge the audience to give it a watch. So let’s find out what happened in the series and if our conwomen were able to conduct a successful heist.
Spoiler Alert
How did Bert end up in prison?
At the beginning of Frauds, we saw that Roberta Mancini, aka Bert, was released from prison on compassionate grounds. She’d been diagnosed with liver cancer, and so she was released after spending 10 years behind bars. Bert’s best friend and partner in crime, Martha Samuels, aka Sam, came to pick her up, and it felt like they shared a close bond with each other, even after 10 years had passed since their last meeting. But their relationship was marred by a lot of things that had happened in the past. Sam was the reason Bert had landed in prison in the first place. Bert and Sam were conwomen, probably the best in the business. Sam had backstabbed Bert by becoming a police informant, a fact that Bert got to know when she was in prison. Sam, in her defense, stated that Bert had a habit of always pushing the limits. She said that the police were already after Bert, and even if she hadn’t betrayed her, she would have landed herself in all sorts of trouble. Sam said that she wasn’t left with much of an option, and she was forced to become a police informant to save her life. Obviously, no amount of excuses could justify what she had done to her partner in crime. These women shared a love-hate relationship with each other. They were inseparable, but still they had ideological differences, and at times they didn’t like how the other person operated. Bert, too, had kept certain secrets hidden, things she knew that mattered to Sam. Around 21 years back, Sam had given her daughter up for adoption. She didn’t know where she was, and probably she never made an effort to find her either. The church had found a family for the girl, and they kept no records of these things, which was why it was impossible for Sam to find Caitlin. But Bert had been able to locate her using her contacts. Bert didn’t tell Sam about it, as she was waiting for the right time to do so. Another secret was that Bert didn’t really have cancer, and she had faked her illness to get out of prison. Bert did so because she knew that Sam would not come to meet her until she learned that Bert had limited time. Bert wanted to see the guilt in Sam’s eyes, and she also needed her for the next/the last job that she was planning. She knew that by keeping Sam in the dark, she was not being a true friend, and she was aware that Sam would feel hurt once she got to know about it. But still, Bert kept feeding her the lies until that one day when the truth came out in the open and everything exploded.
Were Bert and Sam able to steal the painting?
Bert’s plan was to steal a controversial Salvador Dali painting, and to do that, firstly, she needed to convince Sam to come on board and then build a team who would help her out during the heist. Bert knew that Sam had not been involved in any illegal activities since she went to prison. But she was also aware of the fact that she itched to get back in the game. She missed the adrenaline rush, and Bert decided to take advantage of that. It took some time, but Bert was finally able to convince Sam. Then Bert got in touch with a woman named Celine, who was an influential businesswoman who had a good grip over the system and some excellent contacts in the black market. Celine was going to purchase that painting from them for $10 million. Bert knew that Celine had already made a deal to have the painting stolen by another conwoman, and so she offered to do the job at a lesser rate. Bert also told Celine that the way she was planning things, nobody would ever come to know that the painting had been stolen. Once Celine got on board, an artist named Bilaal came to make an exact replica of the Salvador Dali painting. Bilaal was so good at what he did that after seeing the painting he made, Celine told Bert and Sam that had she not known that it was a fake, she would have mistaken it for the real one. Before ending up in prison, there were certain people who were a part of Bert’s gang. One of them was a woman named Jackie Diamond, who helped them create whatever props they needed for the heist. She had married a narcissistic man named Craig, who was a magician, and of late, his shows had become quite a success. Jackie was not happy with him, but she couldn’t find the courage to leave him.
Moreover, Craig was a brilliant manipulator, and he had mastered the art of gaslighting. He knew how not to let Jackie leave or let her exercise her free will. Apart from Bilaal and Jackie, Miss Take, somebody who was like a mother to Bert, was also made a part of the team. Miss Take was the one who took care of Bert after the latter’s mother ran away with her lover, never to return again. Again, with Miss Take, Bert shared a love-hate relationship. At times, Bert felt like Miss Take took advantage of her, and she had no real feelings for her. But then she was the one who had supported her in the absence of her mother. Bert also had Blas, who was one of the guards at the prison she had developed a close bond with, on her team. In accordance with the plan, Blas got a job in the security department of the museum where the painting was kept. The plan was that the Miss Take would create a distraction, and Sam and Bert would use that window to replace the real painting with a fake. Caitlin was supposed to enter the museum with a baby stroller, in which the painting would be hidden. Blas’ work was to loop pre-recorded footage on the security system so that the CCTV camera didn’t show their live footage. There were many obstacles that came in Sam and Bert’s way, but somehow they managed to stay on track and conduct the heist successfully. In the end, Sam and Bert got the money, and they finally had a chance to make a fresh start.
Was Caitlin Sam’s daughter?
Although the heist went off successfully and Sam and Bert believed they had everything under control, they were completely unaware of what Caitlin was plotting behind the scenes. After pulling off the heist and getting the money from Celine, both Sam and Bert began secretly scheming to double-cross each other. Sam wanted to run away with the money because she knew that Bert would never stop chasing them, given that she couldn’t lay low for long. She wanted to make her helpless by taking all the money. Bert, on the other hand, sought revenge, and she had decided to call the cops on her best friend. So Bert did call the police, and she asked Caitlin to leave with her, since she was the one who had looked after her and made sure she did what she loved. Sam didn’t want her daughter to get mixed up with the world of crime, so Bert told her that with her, she would get an opportunity to do whatever she liked. But that’s when Caitlin dropped a bomb, and neither Sam nor Bert saw it coming. Caitlin told both the women that she was not Sam’s daughter. Caitlin’s real name was Sara, and what she didn’t tell the ladies was that she was the daughter of the prison nurse, Maria, who helped Bert get those fake medical documents she needed to get an early release. Maria knew that once Bert was out, she would do something big. She also knew that she was searching for the daughter of her best friend. Since Bert and Sam both didn’t know what the real Caitlin looked like, Maria asked Sara to take advantage of that fact and use it to their advantage.
So Sara took all the money from Bert and Sam and escaped from the scene. Since Bert had already called the police, she knew that she and Sam would have to escape before they were thrown behind bars. While Sam and Bert were on the run, Sara went to pick her mother up from the prison, who told her that she did an amazing job.
What’s Next For Bert And Sam?
Bert and Sam were like two peas in a pod. While Sam had, in a way, betrayed Bert, the latter, too, had come out with an intention of duping her. She didn’t tell her about her fake diagnosis for the longest time, and all hell broke loose once Sam found out about it. They had major disagreements with each other because of their different styles of working, and also because of the resentment they held against each other. While Bert’s desire for revenge stemmed from the fact that she had been left to rot in prison for ten long years, Sam’s resentment came from a very different place. Sam never approved of the way Bert constantly pushed the boundaries; she believed Bert had a tendency to take things too far, to the point where everything eventually fell apart. In Sam’s eyes, Bert was someone who could never be satisfied with what she had, a woman addicted to the thrill and that rush of adrenaline that came with living on the edge and going against the law. Sam also found it difficult to trust her; she always felt that Bert would turn on anyone, even those closest to her, if it served her purpose. We saw how Bert craved Sam’s validation after the former assaulted Jackie’s husband, since he was forcing her to stay with him. Bert hit the man so hard that he ended up in the hospital. It took some convincing to bring Jackie back on board, and Sam was just not happy about it.
And yet, despite all these conflicts and differences, the irony of their bond was that they were more alike than either of them wanted to admit. On the surface, they appeared to be opposites, two women who had completely different personalities, but deep down, their cores were quite similar. They both carried the same restlessness, the same defiance against the world, and perhaps even the same loneliness that drove them to chaos. Their relationship was like that of bickering siblings: they could barely stand each other when face-to-face, yet they couldn’t exist without one another either. They shared a strange bond, and most of the time, they were not ready to accept that they needed each other, but they found ways to come back together.
In Frauds’ ending, Sam and Bert were still on the run, and the police weren’t able to catch hold of them. They both decided to find Sara and get their money back. I believe that they would need all the help that they could find, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Jackie and Miss Take once again join forces with them. If there is a Frauds season 2, it would be interesting to see what Sara does next and if Bert and Sam are able to locate her and get their revenge.
