Binge-r #240: The Girlfriend Experience + Line of Duty
Your Blue Room: Julia Goldani Telles (Iris) in The Girlfriend Experience
THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE S3
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: Five episodes now streaming, new episode Sunday
A knotty anthology series about the true cost of transactional relationships, desire’s place in female identity, and the Pinter-patter of conversations operating on dual levels, The Girlfriend Experience was one of television’s best experiments at the start of the streaming boom. Launched from the tenuous foundation of Stephen Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name, the initial two seasons in 2016 and 2017 gave the reins to independent filmmakers Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, who depicted the lives of high-end escorts – Riley Keough in the first, Carmen Ejogo and Louise Krause in the second – as high-wire acts of self-control and abstract studies of sexual need. The characters could be icy and obtuse, yet also belligerent and cripplingly open.
This unexpected third season upends the few creative constants. The show has crossed the Atlantic to London, given creative control to German filmmaker Anna Marquardt, and tied technology’s new frontiers to sex work’s historic economy. When Iris (Julia Goldani Telles) quits her PhD in neuroscience in the States, she cuts her hair and gets two new jobs in London: researcher with ambitious – or is that malfeasant – dating start-up NGM by day, escort with exclusive agency The V by night. With a suitably detached perspective, Iris sees the two gigs as intertwined. She records each meeting with a client set up The V as an experiment she might identify applicable data from, while in the office she develops a project to teach AI how to match people together.
“We are a human desire company,” her supervisor declares, and it doesn’t really matter at which company because Marquardt’s style, in the initial episodes at least, favours uneasy deception; the very first scene plays like an askew art installation, until you realise it’s a job interview conducted in virtual reality. It is intriguing, but not entirely satisfying, but it is clearly playing the long game. One discrepancy may be Telles’ performance, which can’t quite hold contradictory impulses in such stark regard as Keough previously did. That said, it’s a welcome outcome for The Girlfriend Experience to get another chance, or for those who’ve never found it on Stan’s recommendations to get their first chance at watching it. If this show teaches us anything, it’s that the concept of what we want is a boundless mystery.
They Fought the Law: Martin Compston (Steve) and Vicky McClure (Kate) in Line of Duty
LINE OF DUTY (Netflix, seasons one to five now streaming): It’s been a difficult week for devotees of the British crime thriller Line of Duty, who’ve been impatiently waiting for the final episode of the sixth season to drop. A national obsession in the U.K., the show has a cult following in Australia that is equally committed to its whirlwind machinations and masterful cliff-hangers – I know because I live with a fan. The story of an anti-corruptions squad that investigates “bent coppers”, the show creates a recessive world of investigation and deceit where hard-fought answers supply fresh doubts instead of satisfaction. I‘ve seen half of every season through couch proximity and it’s easily watchable, with the narrow emotional range offset by a solid cast and expertly deployed additions to individual arcs such as Thandiwe Newton and Stephen Graham. The current season is streaming on BritBox, but Netflix has all five previous seasons for those who need a new police procedural. The creator and architect is Jed Mercurio, who was also responsible for the white-knuckle 2018 Netflix limited series Bodyguard [full review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade (1996, 101 minutes) is a bone dry idiosyncratic comedy – with a young Miranda Otto – that offers a unique vision of love in a small Australian town; Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005, 102 minutes) combines Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer for a blackly-tinged crime mystery that has great fun with Hollywood’s failings.
New on Stan: John Belushi was a comic genius with a self-destructive streak – it’s a familiar starting point, but R.J. Cutler’s documentary Belushi (2020, 109 minutes) has enough valuable testimony and archival detail to stand apart; Bound (1996, 109 minutes) was the Wachowski’s audition to make The Matrix, a taut lesbian noir thriller with Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as respectively an ex-con and gangster’s mistress having a covert affair.
New on SBS on Demand: If you fondly remember the British series Outnumbered, where a family’s mishaps invariably attained unstoppable comic momentum, you’ll probably take to What We Did on Our Holiday (2014, 92 minutes), a comedy written and directed by the show’s creators where Rosamund Pike and David Tennant play a couple with children trying to calmly get through a family holiday before splitting up.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to catch up on Stan’s bracing sibling comedy This Way Up and the glossy new version of The Mosquito Coast on Apple TV+.
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