Binge-r #202: Little Birds + Difficult People
Desert Rose: Juno Temple (Lucy Savage) in Little Birds
LITTLE BIRDS S1
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All six episodes now streaming
Right now Stan is my go-to streaming service for unconventional dramas: P-Valley might be set in a contemporary Black strip club and Little Birds amongst the expatriate community in 1950s Tangiers, but both these unheralded new shows use contested spaces to reveal female and queer agency while stoking topical drama amidst distorted realities. Created by Qatari-American artist and filmmaker Sophia Al Maria, the latter subverts the traditional colonial period drama, where the houses are luxurious and the servants silently obliging. Here the Moroccan city simmers under French rule even as the international community indulges in sexual and creative freedom. With its forced perspectives and engorged production design, Little Birds succeeds by revealing how its cross-section of characters are all living under restraints of one kind or another.
For American debutante Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) the city is meant to be a new life. Treated with porcelain fragility and psychiatric care by her wealthy arms manufacturer father, Grant (David Costabile), she’s essentially transferred to the care of her impossibly English fiancé, Hugo Cavendish-Smyth (Hugh Skinner), who is introduced in the arms of his gay lover, Adham Abaza (Raphael Acloque). The tonal switches are blunt, but illuminating: Hugo trying to avoid sleeping with Lucy is played as a sex farce, but there’s equally something deeply genuine in how she tries to get past her brittle father figure dependence. Al Maria also wends references to a posthumous 1979 erotic short story collection by Anais Nin through the plotting, adding a shadow text to the narrative’s personal and political friction.
Alongside the colourful expatriates – Pedro Almodovar favourite Rossy de Palma plays a decadently wealthy society queen – there’s a streets up focus on the Moroccan community, notably fiercely defiant brothel dominatrix Cherifa Lamour (Yuman Marwan), whose relationship with Lucy builds over the six episodes. The first time they meet, in a nightclub bathroom, Lucy shows Cherifa the gun her father gifted her. “You want to touch it?” the heiress asks. “It’s made special for ladies.” It’s an offhand moment of potent imagery and suggestion, which is what Little Birds does exceptionally well. As with P-Valley, there’s a sense that the creator is aware of television’s conventions but isn’t particularly concerned about adhering to them. I’ll take that any day.
It Takes Two: Billy Eichner (Billy) and Julie Klausner (Julie) in Difficult People
DIFFICULT PEOPLE (SBS on Demand, S1/S2/S3 now streaming): SBS on Demand has picked up all three seasons of this gloriously scabrous comedy. It originally ran between 2015 and 2017, but has barely aged a day because hilarious self-entitlement, rude NYC manners, and prickly comic timing are timeless elements. Julie Kessler (Julie Klausner, the show’s creator) and Billy Epstein (Billy Eichner) are a pair of struggling New York comics hitting mid-thirties reality who negotiate the rest of the world with disdain but are deeply loyal best friends to each other. They are horrible, but in ways both entertaining and honest – they can’t help blowing a business meeting when they discover the person opposite them has named their children Memphis and Maverick. The duo exemplify Jewish-American comedic conventions – Julie’s mother, psychiatrist Marilyn (Andrea Martin), is textbook overbearing – and then twist them into fresh laughs. The show gives them few triumphs, but when Billy has a setback Julie is there to ask him, “Do you want to take a walk around the block and talk about Susan Sarandon”. Their scorn is a great 2020 tonic.
>> Great Show/New Service: Stan has long had all three seasons of the Silence of the Lambs prequel Hannibal, a gorgeously macabre serial killer drama with Mads Mikkelsen as the then brilliant psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter and Hugh Dancy as the FBI profiler who consults him, but it’s now also available on Netflix. The artful gore and twisted dynamic is recommended. [season one review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: A sequel to The Shining wasn’t necessary, but Stephen King wrote the book in 2013 and now Mike Flanagan directs Doctor Sleep (2019, 151 minutes), with Ewan McGregor as the grown – but obviously traumatised – Danny Torrance in a horror film that repurposes its own nostalgia
New on SBS on Demand: With a young cast for the ages – Brie Larson in a career-making performance, Lakeith Stanfield, Kaitlyn Dever, and Rami Malek all feature – Destin Cretton’s compelling independent drama Short Term 12 (2013, 93 minutes) explores a residential care facility for at risk teens, displaying vivid nuance in examining how people respond to physical and emotional trauma.
New on Stan: Simultaneously a celebration and a critique of what happens when you make dispensing pleasure your business, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike (2012, 111 minutes) is a technically accomplished, gender-flipped Hollywood entertainment with Channing Tatum and his abs as an exotic dancer in search of affirmation; Crank (2006, 88 minutes) is a knowingly bananas Jason Statham action film that plays like a fanboy’s fantasies.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about SBS on Demand’s zombie apocalypse drama Fear the Walking Dead and Netflix’s Viking satire Norsemen.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 249 series reviewed here, 148 movies reviewed here, and 35 lists compiled here.
