Binge-r #213: The Queen's Gambit + Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
The Missing Piece: Anya Taylor-Joy (Elizabeth Harmon) in The Queen’s Gambit
THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All seven episodes now streaming
Genius is both a gift and a burden in this insightful and entertaining Netflix limited series, where the framing rules and 64 square board of chess are a seductive rebuke to the lives of those seeking to grandmaster them. First seen trying to desperately sober up in a 1967 Parisian hotel suite on the morning she plays the imposing Russian world champion, Elizabeth ‘Beth’ Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a 21-year-old American prodigy whose talents are so intertwined with her self-destructive instincts that it’s unclear if one can flourish without the other. That’s a rich if familiar equation, but writer and director Scott Frank – whose previous Netflix series, 2017’s Godless [full review here], was a terrific revisionist western – gives it an illuminating perspective. Beth teeters in telling ways.
Crucial to that is the performance of Taylor-Joy (The Witch, Split), who has a sense of self-possession so fierce that you start to see the cost it demands. Haunted by the memory of her mother, Alice (Chloe Pirrie), a mathematician whose suicide left her a nine-year-old orphan (played with astounding exactitude by Isla Johnston), Beth instinctively grasps chess – and the obsessive dedication it demands – as soon as a gruff janitor, William Shaibel (Bill Camp), explains the game. Beth can be selfish, aloof, and unforgiving – the way she crushes opponents is triumphant but consuming. The game’s language of “openings” and “defence” reflects how she experiences life, even after she’s adopted as a 15-year-old by a Kentucky housewife Alma Wheatley (Marielle Heller) negotiating her own position.
In Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel Beth’s key games are detailed by her third person voice as lengthy experiences, complete with emotional and tactical shifts. Scott makes the games faster and tells them through Taylor-Joy’s flinty glances and crushed acceptance. The series has an exaggerated visual style which is crucial to the storytelling, whether it’s Gothic melodrama or luxurious period detail. It’s not a mundane existence, and that raises the stakes for Beth whether she’s seeing off male opponents who dismiss her at first glance or trying to find a sense of place where she can belong outside the board’s rigid grid. A much needed success for Netflix even with the plot’s steady ascent, The Queen’s Gambit makes you perceive the world through the eyes of its subject, whose many moves bring brief victory but never lasting security.
>> Great Show/New Service: Timelier than ever, the first three seasons of fractured American thriller Mr. Robot have been added to Stan, with Rami Malek as a cyber security expert whose uncertain perceptions of reality are evocatively wound into paranoid and political strands by the show’s maestro, Sam Esmail. It is grimly gripping.
Pajama Party: Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat Sagdiyev) in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM (Amazon Prime Video, 2020, 97 minutes): In 2006’s Borat Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakhstani television reporter was a sincere buffoon who accidentally drew poison from lingering American wounds. His return, as re-election looms for “McDonald Trump” is more pointed in its aims, but just as informative. With its images of debutante balls and conservative conferences, protestors armed with automatic weapons and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani reaching where he really shouldn’t, director Jason Woliner’s mix of mockumentary and hoax is a snapshot of right wing delusion that doesn’t know how to handle Cohen’s comic lunacy and revealing enquiries. There are scenes that are jaw-droppingly funny and scenes that are just jaw-dropping, and the episodic narrative is nimble enough that the film’s defining relationship, between Borat and his 15-year-old “non-male son” Tutar (Maria Bakalova), starts with outrageous comic satire and graduates to outrageous emancipation and love; even when he gives what you want, Cohen mostly manages to extract something unexpected in return.
New on Netflix: Rebecca (2020, 123 minutes) is a lush, stultifying romantic thriller that doesn’t come close to Hitchcock’s 1940 film, with director Ben Wheatley leaving Lily James and Armie Hammer adrift as conflicted newlyweds; The Way Back (2020, 108 minutes) is a sports redemption drama about a struggling alcoholic hired to coach his old high school basketball team that can’t transcend the genre despite a committed Ben Affleck performance.
New on Stan: A Texan neo-noir of desire and murder, the Coen brothers 20something debut Blood Simple (1984, 96 minutes), with Frances McDormand and Dan Hedaya, is a clockwork catastrophe without their subsequent ironic distance; John Hillcoat’s Lawless (2012, 115 minutes), is a bloody hillbilly crime drama with big accents and bigger stars – Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman, and more.
New on SBS on Demand: Taylor Hackford’s An Office and a Gentleman (1982, 120 minutes) was a polished throwback to classic Hollywood romantic drama with Richard Gere and Debra Winger as outsiders drawn together; a down and dirty Ozploitation action film, The Man from Hong Kong (1975, 102 minutes) foresaw the influence of Asian action cinema and gave George Lazenby a suitable homecoming role.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about SBS on Demand’s Texan crime thriller Briarpatch and Netflix’s Aaron Sorkin courtroom drama The Trial of the Chicago 7.
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