Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damien O’Meara, Lecturer, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University
This month’s streaming slate is packed with bold, conversation-starting TV, from an expose of the toxic manosphere, to a Netflix comedy featuring a very horny Rachel Weisz. If you’re feeling nostalgic, there’s even an old classic from French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda. So settle in and get watching!
Homebodies
SBS On Demand
When Nora (Claudia Karvan) breaks her leg, her son Darcy (Luke Wiltshire) – a trans man – returns home to see her for the first time since he came out. It doesn’t take long before Darcy realises there’s another presence in his childhood home: a ghost of his younger pre-transition self, Dee (Jazi Hall).
Homebodies gives space for an exploration of the challenging, interpersonal relationship between Darcy and his mother through the haunting of an unresolved rift. Refreshingly, this is done without Darcy ever doubting his understanding and acceptance of himself.
In some ways that feels true, but Dee is also part of a past Darcy is not acknowledging. Dee is not just a dramatic foil to allow for the exposition of how Darcy came to this place in his life. Rather, he is sharing that journey with who he was before it started.
The value of such conversations stems from the authenticity behind the story. From writer and director AP Pobjoy, Homebodies strikes an effective balance in its specificity, while feeling like a story audiences will be able to connect with in big or small ways.
– Damien O’Meara
Read more: Homebodies: bold TV about a trans man, his mother and the conversations they never had
Vladimir
Netflix
The new Netflix limited series Vladimir centres on erotic desire. It’s a story about “limerence”, a psychological state first identified by American psychologist Dorothy Tennov, in which a person’s thoughts and fantasies become dominated by another, and are accompanied by an overwhelming, obsessive desire for that feeling to be returned.
Rachel Weisz plays M, an English professor who develops an intense fixation on a newly arrived colleague, the self-consciously handsome Vladimir (Leo Woodall). M comes across as disturbingly shallow until it becomes clear her fixation has incapacitated her. As the show unfolds, it seems her imagined intimacy with Vladimir might be more enthralling than reality could deliver.
M’s husband John (John Slattery), also a professor, is suspended for sexual misconduct involving students. When pressured to say what she thinks, M dismisses the opportunity to support the young exploited women, instead saying “it was another time”. This refrain of providing generational justifications and avoiding accountability is emphasised throughout the series.
M divulges directly to the camera (in one of many instances of breaking the fourth wall) that middle age has rendered her invisible. However, despite menopausal asides about chin hair, she is too beautiful for us to believe this. It’s more likely her students no longer connect with her outdated ideas.
This adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s provocative 2022 debut novel Vladimir is likely to divide audiences, but its discomfort is compelling and original. I highly recommend it.
– Lisa French
Harry Styles. One Night in Manchester
Netflix
The “one night only” music performance is relatively new for streamers like Netflix, but quite an established format for its broadcast predecessors; think Elvis’ 68 Comeback Special, for example. And like Elvis, Styles is a master of mainstream pop music, perfectly pitched at an intersectional audience and dripping with charisma.
From his One Direction roots in the early 2010s, to becoming a fully fledged solo icon, One Night In Manchester showcases Styles’ latest album Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally. It’s a huge event for parent record company Columbia Records (owned by Sony Music Entertainment).
One Night is staged to bring Styles’ multi-stadium persona back to a relatively small audience, providing intimacy and immediacy for those watching at home. The performance is supported by incredible musicians such as the House Gospel Choir. And unlike the ’68 leather-clad Presley, Styles himself appears relatively understated – save for some delightful (if not daggy) dancing and swift movements from lead singer to piano, guitar and synth.
The audience in the room play a vital part too. Their singalongs to Aperture and Dance No More make these new songs sound like canon, while close-ups of fans embracing older hits such as Sign Of The Times remind us how good music can continue to connect us.
– Liz Giuffre
Scarpetta
Prime Video
Chief medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta first emerged in Patricia Cornwell’s 1990 debut novel Postmortem, and has appeared in nearly 30 books since then. So it’s no surprise Prime Video’s decision to adapt the mystery-thriller series for TV has been eagerly awaited by fans. Unfortunately, Scarpetta is muddled at best – and a hot mess at worst.
The series unfolds over two timelines. In the present day, Scarpetta (Nicole Kidman) is called to a crime scene where the naked body of a female victim is bound and displayed. Flashbacks to 30 years earlier reveal a young Scarpetta (Rosy McEwen) on the hunt for a serial killer with a similar modus operandi. The suggestion that she may have got the wrong man back in 1998 threatens to blow up her career.
The ethical implications of this are never properly explored, however, as the series focuses instead on the fraught dynamics of Scarpetta’s present-day family. These include her vodka-swilling, histrionic sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis), tech-genius niece Lucy and, quite bafflingly, a chatbot imitating Lucy’s dead wife.
Careening between soapy family drama and police procedural, Scarpetta suffers from serious bloat. And despite its bizarre AI subplot, it is curiously dated especially in its treatment of gender politics: the misogyny the young Scarpetta navigates is significantly diluted, while the series’ treatment of female victims recalls the sensationalism of pre-#metoo shows such as Law & Order: SVU.
The 90s might be having a revival, but Scarpetta’s failings suggest some things are best left in the past.
– Rachel Williamson
Vagabond
Mubi
I was delighted to see Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, or “without roof or law”) return to MUBI as part of its ongoing Agnès Varda collection. Having only seen the film once, years ago, I was eager to rewatch one of Varda’s (countless) masterpieces. Like earlier titles such as Cleo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) and Le Bonheur, Vagabond is a daring display of narrative filmmaking.
True to Varda’s distinctive style, the film probes the limits of cinematic storytelling. Infusing documentary elements – such as testimonial-like sequences and cleverly placed fourth wall breaks – Vagabond stitches together the story of Mona, a rebellious young drifter who, in the film’s opening sequence, is discovered frozen to death in a ditch.
Backtracking from this initial encounter, Varda explores the enigma of Mona through the characters she encountered during her final weeks, crafting a fragmentary portrait of the young woman via flashbacks, memories and impressions. As other characters discuss their brief encounters with Mona, their testimonies often reveal more about social prejudices and taboos than they do about her.
Mona’s psychological interiority remains a mystery, as the viewer is only led to speculate upon the circumstances that led to her futile reality. Subverting the prominent trope of the male drifter, Varda does not sensationalise the protagonist’s circumstances. Rather, she presents both an opaque and brutal portrait of loneliness and liberty, humanism and cruelty.
– Oscar Bloomfield
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere
Netflix
By now most of us have encountered the “manosphere” – the online ecosystem that repackages misogyny, anti-feminism and male grievance into a form of “self-improvement”.
Journalist Louis Theroux has further lifted the lid on this dangerous ideology in his new documentary, Inside the Manosphere, which exposes some of the key individuals driving this culture. In his measured and sometimes risky style, Theroux traces not only the rhetoric of so-called “high-value men”, but also the business model that sustains them. The result is both illuminating and unsettling.
Through interviews and the influencers’ own content, we see the defence of a regressive gender hierarchy and attempts to restore it. All the while, subscription “academies” set up by leading figures convert young mens’ insecurities into income.
Running alongside the hustle narrative is a thread of conspiratorial thinking. Interviewees invoke the “matrix” as a metaphor for institutional systems trying to keep men compliant, and blind to alternative paths to power.
While the documentary doesn’t dive too deep into the real-world harms of the manosphere (on both women and young men), it does provide some important context for the rise of misogynistic attitudes in our schools and workplaces. Theroux is right to suggest we all are, in some sense, now living inside the manosphere.
– Steven Roberts
Read more: Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere exposes the business model of misogyny
– ref. Alpha males, Harry Styles, and going mad with desire: what to watch in April – https://theconversation.com/alpha-males-harry-styles-and-going-mad-with-desire-what-to-watch-in-april-278987
