Binge-r #183: Babylon Berlin + The Platform
Star Light: Caro Cult (Betty Winter) in Babylon Berlin
BABYLON BERLIN S3
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All 12 episodes new streaming, plus S1 + S2
An explanation: normally I review new shows, not return seasons. But in a hectic yet somehow stationary week – I know, right? – I was desperate to watch the first new episodes in years of one of Netflix’s finest show. And, frankly, the debut Netflix series I did have pencilled in, the cocaine and occult 19th century Vienna thriller that is Freud, was simply a disaster worth nothing more than a strict NO. Babylon Berlin did not let me down: set at a crossroad of history in 1929, this immaculate period drama has the relentless energy of a thriller and wide lens take of an historic epic. In the faltering Weimar Republic, political plots, criminal endeavours, now forgotten advances, and flawed personal desires interlace to paint a portrait of a society traumatised by Germany’s loss in World War I and stalked by the growing National Socialist movement.
Beginning in a stock exchange reeling from the apocalyptic crash on Wall Street and then flashing back five weeks, the third season continues to revolve around a police inspector, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a dedicated raw nerve nonetheless staggering under his burdens, and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a survivor from Berlin’s slums whose ambition has carried her into the police force. An incident on the Babelsberg Studio set of a Betty Winter (Caro Cult) movie – complete with an immaculate musical sequence rich in German expressionism – provides a new front to the plot’s compelling tangle of individuals and ideologies. The subtitled third season retains the qualities that await new viewers: evocative production design, the masterful intercutting of concurrent sequences, and vivid characters. There’s nothing aloof about Berlin Babylon – it aims to quicken the pulse and it readily embraces the era’s fantastical possibilities. I can’t recommend this show highly enough.
Hunger Games: Zorion Eguileor (Trimagasi) in The Platform
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
THE PLATFORM (Netflix, 2020, 94 minutes): If Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer was a dissection of inequality working on a horizontal scale, this unsparing Spanish horror-thriller makes a similar case on the vertical. In a vast and inexplicable concrete prison, new inmate Goreng (Ivan Masague) learns from veteran Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), a platform laden with fine dining descends each day. Each level has two inmates and those at the top can indulge, but the pickings get dangerously sparse the lower it travels. Each month the inmates are reassigned a level, and if your imagination turns to the threat of cannibalism for the deprived at the bottom Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s adroit movie is a step ahead of you. The background is sparse, allowing the ramifications of the concept to become grimly apparent. With its stark tableaus and cryptic exchanges, this R-rated study of position and responsibility shows how the system invariably shapes the individual. “The people above make me do it,” one inmate bearing malice tells another by way of explanation, and even as the Holy Communion and action film gore in the name of reform are invoked, The Platform holds up a timely light to many of our contemporary fears.
New on SBS on Demand: Polish-born filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski turned heads with his elegiac 2018 romantic tragedy Cold War, but his previous feature, Ida (2013, 79 minutes) is even better: a heartbreaking journey towards personal and national comprehension set in the 1960s Communist era and without an extraneous shot, where an uncompromising prosecutor (Agata Kulesza) seeks out with her niece (Agata Trzebuchowska), a novice nun.
New on Stan: A very Irish tale of faith’s fickle attraction, John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary (2014, 97 minutes) stars a never better Brendan Gleeson as a wayward priest who is told in the confessional that he’s to be murdered; Mousehunt (1997, 98 minutes) is a freewheeling family comedy with a wonderfully macabre streak and a killer Christopher Walken supporting role.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here for the review of two very different but equally promising new Netflix series: the deceptive and dysfunctional London comic-drama Feel Good and the wild American eccentricities of the docuseries Tiger King.
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