Binge-r #241: Halston + Girls5eva

Grand Designs: Ewan McGregor (Halston) in Halston

HALSTON

Streaming Service: Netflix

Availability: All five episodes now streaming

“I was brilliant,” declares the imperious American fashion designer Halston (Ewan McGregor) after the audience shrugs their way through his first show. “They’re the dummies.” It’s that spirit – dismissive, delicious, and decadent – which should underpin this rise and fall limited series. Spanning the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Halston is a real life fashion melodrama meant to be more fabulous than any fiction. It gets there, at times, but the immaculate design and period set-pieces can’t always distract from the workmanlike storytelling. Collectively the five episodes have a steady beat that gets a little close to ticking off boxes; it lacks the transformative freedom that its subject brought to his clothes.

With its mix of celebrity, fashion, and a dramatic downfall, the show sits in a lineage crafted by uber-producer Ryan Murphy – who has his own boutique studio set up inside Netflix – that includes The People V. O.J. Simpson [full review here] and The Assassination of Gianni Versace [full review here]. The central killing here is cruelly corporate, but the flaws of the famous and the way they engage with those close to them, for better or usually worse, along with charting gay culture’s secret history, is familiar. A farm boy who reinvented himself as a famous milliner, Halston gets a replacement family, including platonic girlfriend and muse Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez), that he drives away as success and an eventual roll call of drugs take hold before bad business decisions complete the punishment.

Created by playwright Sharr White along with input from numerous writers including Murphy, the first episode is particularly workmanlike in setting up Halston’s work, sex life, and neuroses. The characters keep explicitly stating what should be the themes. The second episode, which focuses on the legendary 1973 France vs. American group fashion show at Versailles, is notably better, with some tangy dialogue that suits the milieu. Latter instalments bring the full Studio 54 experience and a self-contained episode, in the mould of The Crown, where an inquisitive outsider, Vera Farmiga’s scent maven, forces Halston to reconsider the psychological scars of his childhood. McGregor, I should add, is good but not great – if you’ve seen Frederic Tcheng’s 2019 documentary you’ll know that the Scottish actor doesn’t quite nail the designer’s air of patrician superiority. “It’s sexy, it’s comfort, it’s freedom,” Halston says of his sensual haute couture – the show struggles to nail two of those qualities.

Oops! They Did It Again: Busy Philipps (Summer), Renee Elise Goldsberry (Wickie), Sara Bareilles (Dawn), and Paula Pell (Gloria) in Girls5eva

Girls5eva (Stan, all eight episodes now streaming): A comedy about a girl group from the MTV-era late nineties making a comeback today, Girls5eva comes from the Tina Fey (who also makes an appearance) and Robert Carlock Sitcom School: creator Meredith Scardino worked for the 30 Rock overseers on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and there’s a familiar lineage here of absurd gags, cutaway punchlines, ludicrous but recognisable hopes, and Dean Winters as a jerk. With plenty of flashbacks and music industry digs – “we’ve been friends ever since we auditioned for a man in a motel in New Jersey,” is quite the origin story – these half hour episodes have a blithe bounce. But it’s underpinned by the idea of women in their forties refusing – whether out of genuine concerns or bizarre conceits – to accept what life is offering them. That can mean taking a gig at the “Eric Trump Casino University”, or trying to get back what they’ve lost along the way. Positivity wins out over negativity, even if the surviving members’ old ‘hits’ are note-perfect teen pop satire.

>> Good Shows/New Seasons/New Homes: The second season of SBS on Demand’s astute comedy Shrill slipped a notch, but there’s still good reason to hope the third and final batch of episodes can finish strongly [season one review]. A terrific Zoe Kravitz makes High Fidelity so much more than a reboot – it’s now streaming on Disney+ after debuting on ABC iView [season one review]. Apple TV+ has a second season of Mythic Quest, one of the best workplace comedies of recent years [season one review].

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980, 102 minutes) is an unyielding revisionist history that shows how the myths of Australians in conflict – in this case the Boer War – can be shattered by the demands of those in power; period drama Babette’s Feast (1987, 99 minutes) is one of the great film about food – the preparation of it, the truths it shows, and the pleasure of consumption – as a maid reveals herself to her employers.

New on Stan: Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney (2018, 121 minutes) is a detailed if constrained documentary about how a star of vast, fizzing proportions couldn’t make her life fit the world she helped build; Traffic (2000, 148 minutes) remains a kaleidoscopic dissection of America’s futile war on drugs from Steven Soderbergh, colour-coded and shot through with a charismatic ensemble cast including Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

New on SBS on Demand: The creative partnership of filmmaker Noah Baumbach and then actor and co-writer Greta Gerwig took off with the terrific 20something comedy Frances Ha (2012, 83 minutes), where the latter plays a young woman coming to grips with a life she mistakenly thinks she has figured out, complete with textured black and white cinematography, Adam Driver, and bittersweet moments of rhapsody.

>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to check out the return of Stan’s icy relationship drama The Girlfriend Experience and Netflix’s early seasons of the British police thriller Line of Duty.

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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 304 series reviewed here, 162 movies reviewed here, and 40 lists compiled here.