Binge-r #191: White Lines + ZeroZeroZero
24 Hour Party People: Laura Haddock (Zoe Walker) in White Lines
WHITE LINES S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming
In this Netflix murder mystery, set in the Spanish clubbing resort of Ibiza, the good times and the thumping backbeats are constant. This is a thriller where the sun-soaked locale’s glossy, hedonistic surface – luxurious villas, packed dancefloors, DJ’s having it, and more top gear than a car enthusiast’s DVD collection – governs the characters and their actions. Pressure is hidden, questions are dodged, and the sea sparkles. If it wasn’t for a mummified body of a long missing English DJ being unearthed, nothing would change for these characters. And yet that’s an idiosyncratic approach for a plot such as this, where the grimness of criminal conspiracies is usually suffocating.
In this instance the detective is also definitely an amateur. Zoe Walker (Laura Haddock) has spent two decades obsessing over why her beloved older brother, Axel (Tom Rhys Harries, in flashbacks), ghosted her after moving to Ibiza to DJ for the first wave of British clubbers. When she learns that his body has been found, she is galvanised by the loss of a lifetime’s trauma and angry that no-one, including the police, wants to revisit Axel’s murder. Starting with her brother’s friend Marcus (Daniel Mays), an established DJ and drug dealer, she digs into the expatriate community and the local crime family, the Calafat’s, who are busy turning their club empire into a casino operation.
White Lines was created by Alex Pina, the Spanish dynamo behind Money Heist, Netflix’s most popular Spanish language series [full review here]. That thriller is a rapacious plot machine, and via comparison this is chilled out; Zoe might injure the Calafat’s enforcer, ‘Boxer’ (Nuno Lopes), but it’s just a way of putting them on bantering good terms. The cultural implications, of ageing 1990s Manchester idealists coping in the 21st century, is sharply sketched, although having one of them, Anna (Angela Griffin), run high-end sex parties for wealthy patrons mainly allows for a lot of flesh for fantasy poolside pans. Even moments of violence have a comical edge, as if the show exists in a world without true ramifications. I’m not sold on White Lines, but I wouldn’t rule it out as a palate cleanser. This beat definitely does go on.
Family Business: Gabriel Byrne (Edward Lynnwood) in ZeroZeroZero
ZEROZEROZERO (SBS on Demand, six episodes now streaming, new episode each Thursday): An international co-production about the global narcotics trade, ZeroZeroZero is a beautifully made and bleakly pessimistic drama about the corrosiveness of organised crime. With a contested shipment of 5,000 kilos of cocaine as the fulcrum, it awkwardly intersects three family-like groups facing internal conflict: a Calabrian Mafia syndicate that orders the drugs, the Mexican cartel that sources them, and the ostensibly respectable American shipping company that brokers transport and delivery. Violence, betrayal, and torture are the norms, with some of the characters so sparsely drawn that they are ciphers for their way of life; there’s none of the rise to infamy antics of the Narcos franchise. But the writing is also alert to the frailties of age and the bitterness of successive generations, with Gabriel Byrne and Adriano Chiaramida notable as besieged patriarchs in New Orleans and Italy respectively. The plot doesn’t so much twist as pinball, and the considerable technical skill only serves to amplify the show’s defining trait of nihilism.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Female defiance defines Wadjda (2012, 93 minutes), the first feature film directed by a Saudi woman, Haifaa al-Mansour, which tells the winning story of a 10-year-old girl (Waad Mohammed) angling for her own bicycle; Inception (2010, 148 minutes) remains Christopher Nolan’s premier brain-bender, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a dream-inhabiting criminal, Bond set-piece homages, and delicious Tom Hardy seasoning.
New on SBS on Demand: In the Moroccan drama (not the Israeli one of the same name) Rock the Casbah (2013, 95 minutes) the death of Omar Sharif’s patriarch brings his wife and daughters together to grieve, retrace secrets, and bridge cultural divides; Shot Caller (2017, 115 minutes) is a gritty dad fantasy about a white collar husband (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who goes to jail and rises in the ranks of the white supremacist gang he has to join.
New on Stan: The Cleaners (2018, 89 minutes) is a brutal but enlightening documentary about the moderators removing the internet’s worst content, a job tech giants have exported like industrial waste to developing countries; the Zellner brothers’ Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014, 100 minutes) is either a movie fantasy or study of mental illness, following a young Japanese woman (Rinko Kikuchi) who travels to America after watching Fargo.
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