Binge-r #260: Ganglands + Sort Of
Muscles from Brussels: Sami Bouajila (Mehdi) and Tracy Gotoas (Liana) in Ganglands
GANGLANDS
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All six episodes now streaming
Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), the Belgian career criminal at the centre of this barbed action-thriller, has no need for monologues. “Let’s go,” he simply tells his crew before the opening armed robbery, and later when an unlikely ally tells him her name and asks the same of him you can see him pause, silently deciding whether he needs to reply. Mehdi is economical, precise, and acts without hesitation – the same qualities applies to the show’s French creator and director, Julien Leclercq. Ganglands is an assured update of archetypal plots, starting with the veteran gunfighter acting to protect a vulnerable family member, which strives to do more with less. In this European production the exposition is minimal, episodes end with sharp twists, and the plot insists you keep up without a helping hand.
As a filmmaker Leclercq has strived to update the action genre, working in a lineage that includes Jean-Pierre Melville’s existential gangsters and Michael Mann’s meditational mayhem. His most recent feature, Sentinelle, also on Netflix, is a revenge thriller starring Olga Kurylenko that comes in at a concise 80 minutes. He carries that over to Ganglands, which uses considered establishing shots to establish the characters before setting them in motion. Mehdi may be a professional, but his niece, Shainez (Sofia Lasaffre) and her girlfriend, Liana (Tracy Gotoas), are not, so when a quick scam unexpectedly nets them a drug syndicate’s cocaine they snatch it. They see a score that gives them choices, but are unprepared for the retribution that swiftly befalls them.
The underlying theme here is the internal struggle between self-control and ill-discipline. Mehdi has mastered the former, but the latter is an issue for the expatriate Moroccan crime family he has to deal with, where the scion, Saber (Salim Kechiouche), is prone to bad decisions, including trying to make Mehdi work for him, while his cousin and money launderer, Sofia (Nabia Akkari) quietly schemes for control. But the terse negotiations and quiet judgments inevitably find expression in action set-pieces that have a vivid momentum and palpable physicality. If crime and action are your favoured genres – or you want an introductory taste of them – Ganglands comes through, complete with a lack of redemptive sentiment. This is the undiluted, superior successor to the Luc Besson and Liam Neeson era.
Northern Exposure: Bilal Baig (Sabi Mehboob) in Sort Of
SORT OF S1 (Stan, all eight episodes now streaming): There are a lot of firsts that precede this generous and recommended Canadian comedy: star and co-creator Bilal Baig is queer, gender-fluid, and Muslim, and their character, Toronto Millennial Sabi Mehboob, shares those defining traits. But the first season doesn’t foreground identity, instead letting it seep into the narrative while presenting Sabi as someone wary of the world whose tentative steps come with acidic commentary and side issues – see their sketchy ex-boyfriend who now wants to commit – that are all too familiar. Tonally situated somewhere between Josh Thomas’ Please Like Me and Issa Rae’s Insecure, Sort Of has unexpected emotional stakes. The family Sabi nannies for opens up issues of care and, in the case of the mother, other currents that challenge Sabi, while putting them in a different setting than the one Sabi shares with exuberant best friend 7ven (Amanda Cordner). This piquant comedy might be about someone trying to figure themselves out, but as a show Sort Of knows exactly what it wants to achieve.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Jane Austen’s novel can encompass any number of themes, so the latest take on Emma (2020, 124 minutes) from filmmaker Autumn de Wilde has a tart modern humour and the otherworldly precision of Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role alongside Johnny Flynn and Josh O’Connor; Diana the Musical (2021, 117 minutes) is an unintentionally hilarious Broadway performance whose worst lyrics are endlessly quotable.
New on SBS on Demand: Making a sequel to a generation-defining film is a thankless task, but nearly everyone involved in the original – including director Danny Boyle – returned for T2 Trainspotting (2017, 113 minutes), a sardonic crime drama that unfolds in the wake of Ewan McGregor’s Renton finally returning to Edinburgh and confronting the wayward friends he abandoned at the end of the original Trainspotting.
New on Stan: The Founder (2016, 116 minutes) is a canny, subversive biopic of Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), the struggling businessman who seized on the fast food concept of the McDonald brothers to create an empire; David Cronenberg is at his most bemused with an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2012, 109 minutes) where Robert Pattinson plays a diffident billionaire whose entourage is staffed by Juliette Binoche and Paul Giamatti.
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