Binge-r #225: It's a Sin + Pretend it's a City

Smalltown Boys: Olly Alexander (Ritchie) and Callum Scott Howells (Colin) in It’s a Sin

IT’S A SIN

Streaming Service: Stan

 Availability: All five episodes now streaming

Queer as Folk, Doctor Who, Torchwood, A Very English Scandal, Years and Years. That’s only some of the television shows created by the prolific Welsh writer and producer Russell T. Davies. His new series, the highs and lows period drama It’s a Sin, doesn’t just take in the familiar elements of his work – the friction of close quarters comedy, genres getting jumbled, a wellspring of emotion – it winds them through the lens of memoir. Beginning in 1981, this is the story of the young gay men who’ve come to London as the first generation to awkwardly embrace liberation, only for the lives to become a mix of joy and sorrow as AIDS reveals itself as a deadly and unknown spectre.

Davies makes the everyday ping with identification, starting with the set-up of his ensemble leads. Ritchie (Olly Alexander) is leaving the Isle of Wight behind for the rush of sexual pleasure, Roscoe (Omari Douglas) flees his strict Christian family before they can send him back to be brutalised in Nigeria, Colin (Callum Scott Howells) fetches up to start a Savile Row apprenticeship, and Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) is a sweet if hedonistic student. By the end of the first episode they’re sharing a rundown apartment with Jill (Lydia West), an arrangement that allows for kitchen-table exchanges and after-parties. A pan across a rom delivers era-specific detail, but Davies and director Peter Hoar are focused more on personal experience than the granular detail of community. There are embarrassments, tears, and a touch of cabaret (the actual sex is slight).

The early episodes intertwine the thrill of freedom and the horrifying spread of the then unknown HIV virus. Davies makes these two worlds one, so that triumphs and mistakes are connected. In one bravura sequence, shot with a musical’s élan, Ritchie dismisses the sketchy rumours and American accounts of AIDS, seeing it as a hoax to shut down gay rights (the contemporary parallel is unmissable). An older gay colleague of Colin’s, Henry (Neil Patrick Harris), delivers the first hint of the new reality, with examples of official disregard and discrimination that soon extend to angry families reclaiming their dying sons. But even as It’s a Sin moves towards activism as the 1980s progress, it has a bedrock vibrancy and humour that makes it warmly compelling. Even tragedy can get the Russell T. Davies treatment.

P.S. A Very English Scandal is streaming on Netflix [full review here]; Years and Years through SBS on Demand [full review here].

New York, New York: Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz in Pretend it’s a City

PRETEND IT’S A CITY (Netflix, all seven episodes now streaming): Fran Lebowitz doesn’t complain, she kvetches. The Yiddish term encompasses a century of Jewish-American humour, with its hints of hardy dismissiveness and stalwart self-deprecation, and it underpins this pleasurable Netflix docuseries where Lebowitz, a humourist with writers block who now talks with wonderful alacrity for a living, reflects on her home for five decades, New York City, and everything the metropolis has shown to her. In tangy half hour episodes these riffs move in and out of each edition’s theme, and no-one enjoys it more than Lebowitz’s friend and the show’s director, Martin Scorsese, who is often on camera with her and nearly always laughing profusely. Scorsese cracking up is quite the tonic, and he backs it up with tantalising visual and musical snippets to counterpoint Lebowitz’s narrative. You’ll know whether this is for you 15 minutes in, but at least do try it. It’s a niche idea that’s wonderfully amplified.

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: More Anya Taylor-Joy – Thoroughbreds (2017, 92 minutes) is a tart teen black comedy, with trace elements of Heathers, about the venal machinations inside a wealthy family’s immaculate household; Outside the Wire (2021, 115 minutes) is a by the numbers action movie whose sci-fi premise and intriguing but barely examined themes never demand a great deal from star Anthony Mackie.

New on SBS on Demand: Starring Carice van Outen as a World War II resistance fighter whose covert identity is lost, Black Book (2006, 140 minutes) marked the return to Dutch cinema of filmmaker Paul Verhoeven after carnal blockbuster years in Hollywood, telling a story of Gestapo counter-insurgency and historic mistakes with a familiar mix of the coolly expressive and ardently lurid.

New on Stan: The Truth (2020, 103 minutes) is Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film outside his homeland, a telling familial drama starring Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, and Ethan Hawke; set during Nicaragua’s bloody civil revolution and starring Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman, Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire (1983, 129 minutes) is an unsettling drama about a U.S. media contingent caught up in Cold War atrocities.

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