Binge-r #176: The Little Drummer Girl + Uncut Gems

Acting Out: Alexander Skarsgard (Gadi) and Florence Pugh (Charlie) in The Little Drummer Girl

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL

Streaming Service: SBS on Demand

Availability: All eight episodes now streaming

Let’s be grateful for SBS’s craftiness. With a public broadcaster’s stretched budget and no international pipeline of programs, SBS on Demand has to find new angles. One that works is to secure the repeat rights to shows that previously aired on the shuttered realm of pay television. It’s the kind of gambit that feels right at home in this study of deception and performance, where the spies are great actors and the actors could be great spies. Adapted from John le Carre’s 1983 novel about an Israeli operation to infiltrate a Palestinian terror cell undertaking bombings across Europe, The Little Drummer Girl is a taut reworking not just of the novel, but the espionage genre itself.

Here’s an emblematic scene: surreptitiously recruited by Mossad, English stage actor Charlie Ross (Florence Pugh) finds herself falling in love with her handler, the commanding Gadi Becker (Alexander Skarsgard). Their attraction is rooted in both their physical proximity and the role Charlie is being prepped for, but when they first kiss the medium shot moves to a close-up of penitent lips and tongues, before cutting to Gadi’s face front-on in the moment of climax, where the camera enters his mouth and Charlie’s eye fill the frame. It’s a mash-up of Salvador Dali and Hitchcock, but no surprise at all when the director is the masterful Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. The director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden works on a vivid plane, where the visual dynamics of pleasure and power are exquisitely connected.

In a scheme plotted by Israeli spymaster Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon), the plot moves through a Europe of uncertain sympathies and striking establishing shots; production design aficionados will geek out on the interiors. There’s a push and pull between personal commitment and political ideology, and all three leads connect in uneasy ways. At the centre of it is Pugh, who has acquired public prominence over the last year with her roles in Midsommar and Little Women. As Charlie she delivers the sensation of making precipitous decisions with tender need, although it’s the statuesque Skarsgard that Park thankfully shoots as an object of desire. Take the second chance to see this bracing series.

Street Hassle: Adam Sandler (Howard) in Uncut Gems

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

UNCUT GEMS (Netflix, 2019, 135 minutes): Cosmic wonder becomes the interior view of a colonoscopy in this jangled, jumpy drama, and that feels philosophically right: give it a chance and the universe will turn your life to shit. Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler, on the money), is a hustling NYC Diamond District jeweller who dispenses way too many chances: he’s a compulsive gambler, is dodging debt collectors, and juggling a wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), and children, along with a mistress, Julia (Julia Fox). He has a scrapper’s shoulders and a voice that switches between invective and invitation. Set both in 2012 and a metre or two from Howard’s whereabouts as he parlays a life-changing deal, which involves a rare black diamond from Ethiopia, this is a showcase for independent filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, whose 2017 crime thriller with Robert Pattinson, Good Time, is already on Netflix [full review here]. The siblings relish jarring tension, authentic amateur actors (the movie treats bit player’s faces with taxonomical pleasure), and a squeezing of the senses. They do all that while showing genuine affection for Howard, which may be the greatest hustle this uneasy and ultimately unforgiving work pulls off.

New on SBS on Demand: Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart are compelling together in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, 123 minutes), a liquid, intimate study of art, commerce and personal transference from French filmmaker Olivier Assayas; An Education (2009, 94 minutes) was Carey Mulligan’s breakthrough role, playing with great interior specificity a 1960s London teenager schooled in the cruel rigours of adult life.

New on Stan: Headlined by a vivid, intuitive performance by Andy Serkis as the acidic British punk musician Ian Dury, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010, 111 minutes) is an impressionistic reworking of the musical biopic; while The Australian Dream, which he cooperated with, is the acclaimed Adam Goodes documentary, The Fifth Quarter (2019, 75 minutes) still shines a strong light on the racist abuse that drove the AFL star from the game.

>> Want BINGE-R sent to your inbox? Click here for the weekly e-mail.

>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 216 series reviewed here, 134 movies reviewed here, and 32 lists compiled here.