For me, Netflix is like an
old flame, where the deep decades-long relationship has cooled into occasional
just-friends get-togethers. I’m critical
of how it has changed for the worse, more aware of its flaws than its
virtues. I ended my last go-round with the channel with a complaint about how they had unceremoniously dumped
a series by one of my favorite living directors. But after a season away, I found quite a bit worth
watching on the service, picking up where I left off.
Hirokasu Kore-eda’s
seven-part series Asura (MC-89) follows in the grand tradition of his earlier film Our
Little Sister, which in turn drew on The Makioka Sisters and many of
Ozu’s domestic dramas. It follows four
sisters: a widow who teaches ikebana, a mother of two teens who suspects her
husband of dallying with his secretary, a demure librarian with a persistent
suitor, and a brash beauty building up her boxer boyfriend (pow, pow, pow). A series of events is precipitated when the librarian
hires an investigator after seeing their father in the company of another woman
and child. Though based on a novel and
tv series from more than forty years ago, and set in that period, this series
was written by Kore-eda and is utterly characteristic of his work, with a
profound understanding of the sister’s relationships with each other and with
their respective partners. Without surprising
plot twists or dramatic incidents, or anything but calculated attention to
everyday life, we come to understand this family and the people in it, to care
for them and to be amused by their eccentricities and interactions. Don’t miss this, though you’ll have to search
to find it on Netflix. Only now do I discover
there was an earlier series by Kore-eda on the channel, The Makanai, with
which I’ll catch up at some point.
I’ve been a big fan of Love
on the Spectrum (MC-83), from
its two Australian series through its three American seasons. It’s the only dating show I’ve ever watched,
and my enjoyment has not diminished. I
repeat my comment on the previous season: “Many types of autistic personality
are represented, and I tend to relate to all of them in one way or
another. The show is respectful, funny, and endearing, and even you
neurotypicals will enjoy dating anxieties and triumphs that ring a bell across
many spectra.” I can’t claim that you
will love this show if you’re not on the spectrum, but I’m betting almost
anyone would find it entertaining.
Stephen Graham is the creator
of the four-part British series Adolescence (MC-91), about a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a
classmate. Besides writing and producing,
he plays the boy’s father. Apparently he
recruited his A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty to play the court-appointed
therapist interviewing the boy in the standout third episode. And also his director from Boiling Point,
Philip Barantini, who seems to specialize in long one-take scenes. Each episode is filmed in one sinuous,
ever-moving take, a technique that sometime impresses and sometimes distracts. The first starts with the police breaking into
the family home and dragging the boy out of bed and down to the police station
for booking. The second follows two
policeman investigating at the boy’s school, and the third has his interview
with the therapist, while the fourth looks at the fallout for his parents and
sister. The subject is grim but the
treatment is serious, with some exploration of the “manosphere” on social media. Beyond the technical marvel of its filming,
the series is well-acted and thought-provoking, and stands out from the
generality of Netflix content.
Toxic Town (MC-84) is another British four-part series, in a vein they
seem to love, about a true-life group of little people banding together to get
theirs back from the powers-that-be (cf. Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office). It was created by Jack Thorne, also a
writer-producer on Adolescence, starring Jodie Whittaker and Aimee Lou
Wood as two mothers who meet in the hospital where they both deliver children
with birth defects. Later it emerges
there was a cluster of cases in this English Midlands town, caused by
corruption around the clean-up of industrial waste after the steel mills shut
down, with a group of mothers bringing a class-action suit. This is the sort of morality play that I
appreciate, with diverse people facing difficult choices, repeatedly inviting
the viewer to ask, “What would I do in this situation?”
After re-watching Luchino
Visconti’s classic version not so long ago, I was dubious about the new Netflix
six-part series of The Leopard (MC-72). How
bastardized would it be? The surprising
answer is not at all. Lush and sensual, this
period piece about Sicily in the 1860s is also serious and smart (unlike some
NFX offerings). Written and directed by
a pair of Englishmen, it’s the product of familiarity and affection rather than
appropriation and exploitation, and Sicily’s tourism bureau got their money’s
worth from supporting this production. All
the actors speak Italian, unlike Visconti’s set, where Burt Lancaster said his
lines in English and Alain Delon in French, and everyone was post-dubbed (I’d
be leery of NFX dubbing). And the acting
is quite good, notably Kim Rossi Stuart as the title character, the Prince of
Salina, and Benedetta Porcaroli as his daughter, Bourbon aristocrats whose way
of life is threatened by Garibaldi and Italian unification. Like Asura,
this series is a hidden treasure amongst Netflix’s international offerings. And now I’ll have to go back and watch
Visconti’s Leopard for the fourth or fifth time, and Senso too.
I gave short shrift to two
new Netflix series that may have merit, but failed to grab me at first glance –
Forever (MC-84) and North of North (MC-77). Your call.
Turning to film, the standout
among recent Netflix offerings is I’m Still Here (MC-85), a recent
Best Picture nominee that took the Oscar for Best International Feature, with Fernanda
Torres nominated for Best Actress. She’s
the subtle heart and soul of the movie, as a mother of five whose husband is
disappeared by Brazil’s military junta in 1971.
He was a former congressman returned from exile, and we see the family living
an enviable life by the beach in Rio, and herein
early scenes director Walter Salles conjures up memories of
Alfonso Cuaron’s marvelous Roma. But
men in plain clothes come to take away the father, and then the mother and one
of the older daughters. The girl is
released the next day, but the mother is held in isolation
for two weeks. The father is never seen
again, though the government denieddenies
ever taking him. It took decades for the
truth of his torture and murder to be revealed, with the family left in painful
doubt for the duration. The film is
based on the youngest son’s memoir and celebrates the mother’s decision to go
to law school at 48 to fight the dictatorship.
Fun fact: in a final sequence from 2014, the elderly mother is played by
Torres’ own mother, who was nominated for Best Actress in 1998 for Salles’ Central
Station. This film seems like a
cautionary tale for our own political moment – it can happen here,
perhaps already is happening.
The panache of Pedro Almodóvar
does not translate in his English-language adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel
The Room Next Door (MC-70). He directs Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton to
speak clunky lines in an uninflected manner, perhaps meant to reflect the seriousness
with which he is approaching the delicate subject of euthanasia. Former war correspondent Swinton is dying of
cancer and asserts her right to refuse treatment and die on her own terms,
enlisting longtime writer friend Moore to keep her company on her final journey,
staying in the “room next door” until the day of her choosing. The film displays many of Almodóvar’s virtues,
but is strangely flavorless. I was drawn
in by the subject and the stars, but did not engage in any deep way.
The Outrun (MC-72) is most notable for
the compelling lead (almost solo) performance of Saoirse Ronan, in this tale of
addiction and recovery, as adapted with deep authenticity by director Nora
Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot, from the latter’s memoir of the same name. The film swings back and forth, in place and
time, between the protagonist’s wild, drunken life in London, where she is
studying biology, and the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, where she came from,
and returns after drying out. She
divides her time between her separated parents, a bipolar father and a mother
who escaped into evangelical religion, before going to spend a winter alone on
the remotest of the islands. The contrast
between the urban party scene and the desolate, frigid seascape is driven home
in alternation, and accented by documentary or animated excursions into the protagonist’s
studies. The elliptical and nonlinear
presentation takes a good deal of piecing together by the viewer, but it’s all
concentrated in Saoirse Ronan’s face, demeanor, and hair color. She’s amazing and makes this film well worth
the effort it takes to watch, both for grimness and eccentricity.
As “Nonno” to my
grandchildren, I felt compelled to give a look to Nonnas (MC-57). It certainly
has a weak and cliché-filled script, with every beat predictable, but I sort of
appreciated seeing NYC from an ethnic Staten Island perspective, and there were
a lot of familiar and welcome faces (e.g. Linda Cardellini and a virtual Sopranos
reunion). Supposedly based on a true
story about a guy (Vince Vaughan) who opened a restaurant as a memorial to his
mother and grandmother, there is very little reality here (after The Bear and
other “hell kitchens,” it’s hard to swallow four seventy-something women
cooking for eighty and then dancing around the restaurant) but a few laughs and
some comforting truisms about food and family.
One piece of generic Netflix
programming that appealed to me for personal reasons was Britain and the
Blitz (MC-tbd). Seemingly inspired by Peter Jackson’s They
Shall Not Grow Old, this film colorizes old documentary footage effectively,
and adds interviews and narration, this time for WWII instead of WWI. One of the characters illuminating the English
homefront in 1940 is a 17-year-old girl.
As it happens, my mother was a 17-year-old girl under the Blitz, so this
personalized, on-the-ground approach to the very familiar story of the Battle
of Britain worked for me.
I’d been thinking of
re-watching American Graffiti (MC-97) when
it turned up on NFX, but the VHS-quality of the streaming deterred me from
watching.
Reliable stand-up performers
return to NFX with new routines in Mike Birbiglia: The Good Life (MC-tbd) and Sarah Silverman:
Postmortem (MC-tbd),
both solid but not their very best. So all
this was certainly worth a month’s subscription to Netflix, but I’m ready to
pause the channel again.
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