Binge-r #211: Fargo + Emily in Paris

American Gangster: Chris Rock (Loy Cannon) in Fargo

FARGO

Streaming Service: SBS on Demand

Availability: Seven episodes now streaming

There’s always been a baroque charm to each season of Fargo, but the fourth instalment of Noah Hawley’s crime anthology pushes the immaculate coincidence and loquacious monologues to their brittle boundary. Leaving behind the chilly Minnesota setting inherited from the Coen brothers’ original 1995 film, the show reappears in Kansas City, Missouri, where the 1950 Jim Crow segregation laws don’t stop rival crime syndicates – one Black, the other Italian – sparring for bloody advantage in an America that is more than ready to discriminate against both while a rogue’s gallery of supporting characters wend their way through the storylines. The nods here are more to Miller’s Crossing, the Coen’s magisterial 1990 gangster film, but the series can’t reach the same rarefied heights.

As the prologue establishes, minorities and newcomers gets a leg up in America through illegally accumulated gains, but the first few episodes don’t know when to stop explicitly making this point. “Here’s the thing about America,” the season’s narrator, whip-smart 16-year-old Ethelrida Pearl Smutney (Emyri Crutchfield) will observe, and her explanation tells us what the scenes are already meant to show us. Hawley, who writes and directs the first two episodes, is depicting the violent transference of power and the institutionalisation of oppression – he shoots his gangland massacres from above with a God’s eye view and then goes close-up on the carnage – and it’s not necessary to spell out how that resonates in 2020.

Thankfully Hawley continues to cast his intricate confrontations exceptionally well. As Loy Cannon, an African-American crime boss, Chris Rock’s braying, corrective comic energy is tempered by greying wisdom and judicious ambition, while Jason Schwartzman as his newly elevated Mafia adversary, Josto Fadda, has an entitled arrogance that’s inverted by his bountiful idiosyncrasies; Ben Whishaw, as the doleful survivor of a previously deposed regime, adds to the theme of subsequent generations dealing with the failings of their forebears. Under such circumstances there’s still room for a true black swan eccentric, and what sums up this season of Fargo is that there’s two: Jessie Buckley’s Oraetta Mayflower, a pernickety nurse with queasy beliefs and Jack Huston’s Odis Weff, a busy homicide detective with a suite of behavioural tics. All these artful contrivances slow Fargo’s spiky momentum.

The French Correction: Lily Collins (Emily Cooper) in Emily in Paris

EMILY IN PARIS (Netflix, all 10 episodes now streaming): Darren Star is a landmark television creator, with Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, Sex and the City, and Stan’s Younger [full review here] on his CV. It would make sense that Netflix wants to be in business with him, but their first collaboration feels like a hurried knock-off of Star’s prior work, or even a satire. Despatched to Paris at the last minute when her American company buys a French firm that represents luxury goods, diligent young marketing executive Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) swiftly encounters every form of Gallic cliché: a snobby boss, dismissive colleagues, a ludicrously handsome neighbour, and picture-perfect views at every turn. At one point Emily, whose professional expertise extends solely to primping social media engagement, has a Carrie Bradshaw moment typing at her laptop, but as the plot’s focus the character is so guileless and reactive that it’s difficult to find pleasure or insight in her 20something travails. When a hunky chef’s departure draws the pun “bone appetite” you know this shallow, xenophobic empowerment comedy has missed the mark.

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: Hollywood studios don’t make movies like The Quick and the Dead (1995, 108 minutes) anymore: a Sam Raimi revenge western with Sharon Stone in the lead and a stacked supporting cast of Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, and Leonardo DiCaprio; the fascinating Dick Johnson is Dead is an elongated goodbye, with documentarian Kirsten Johnson (Camperaperson) inventively staging scenes and reckoning with the past as she charts the possible ways her ailing – but cooperative – father might pass.

New on SBS on Demand: Beautiful Boy (2018, 116 minutes) is an addiction tale about a father trying to save his son that is compact and empathetic, but the disparity between the dramatic performances of Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell is jarring; a serenely stunning wuxia martial arts movie from Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, The Assassin (2015, 102 minutes) has a spectral physicality and heartrending narrative

New on Stan: A stark examination of a marriage’s flaws, Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure (2014, 115 minutes) dissects a couple whose perceptions are irrevocably altered by a near-miss tragedy; Nicolas Cage has given many weird performances, but few are as knowingly framed as Vampire’s Kiss (1989, 104 minutes), an eruptive and unrelenting black comedy about a man convinced he is joining the undead.

>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about Michael Sheen and David Tennant in ABC iView’s lockdown comedy Staged and the Apple TV+ spy thriller Tehran.

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