Binge-r #252: Brand New Cherry Flavour + The Pursuit of Love
Final Cut: Rosa Salazar (Lisa Nova) in Brand New Cherry Flavour
BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOUR
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
In the second episode of this darkly idiosyncratic limited series, aspiring filmmaker Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar), her career in tatters and hungering for revenge, seeks out Boro (Catherine Keener), a cat lady who lives in a Los Angeles hothouse and has extras from Tool’s music clips as her human menagerie. Engaging Boro’s services, Lisa grows ill and slowly vomits… something that’s moving. This, frankly, is just what Netflix needs. The streaming service has grown awfully predictable these last 12 months, and Cooking with Paris will not persuade me otherwise. After a few episodes I’m not sure Brand New Cherry Flavour will be good, but it’s refusal to toe the line is definitely welcome.
Adapted from Rick Grimson’s novel by Nick Antosca (The Act) and Lenore Zion (Ray Donovan), it’s set in Hollywood of the early 1990s, where Steven Soderbergh is “the Sex, Lies, and Videotape kid” and Lisa comes to town fresh from making a B&W horror short that entrances people in questionable ways. The narrative is illustrated by pulsing neon, menacing observers, and artsy warehouse living where mannequins lurk in the corner, which all start to fray the edges of reality once Lisa rejects the personal advances of a leading Hollywood producer, Lou Burke (Eric Lange), but still gets screwed over by the contract she signs with him to direct the feature length version of her short. Soon she’s seeing demons and breaking into Lou’s house to steal pubic hair for a curse Boro is preparing.
Rosa Salazar has luminously large eyes and they are one of the show’s freakiest assets – they can burn with obsessive dedication and then go wide-eyed with terror. Lisa is self-contained with a detached, evaluative outlook, which makes her quite the foil for the supernatural-tinged fracas that starts to rear up. Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon and David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars are the uneasy antecedents for the show, but Brand New Cherry Flavour has its own twisted logic, overheated aims, and Keener, who implicitly understands how to illuminate Boro while staying – initially at least – just inside the limits of luridness. This is not going to be a hit for Netflix, but it’s a reminder that their dramas can still surprise and even perplex viewers. If that intrigues you, take a walk on the wild side.
Bridge Over Troubled Water: Andrew Scott (Merlin) and Lily James (Linda) in The Pursuit of Love
THE PURSUIT OF LOVE (Amazon Prime, all three episodes now streaming): Every hamstrung quality of the period drama is cut cleanly free by actor turned writer-director Emily Mortimer’s effervescent and ultimately elegiac adaptation of Nancy Mitford best-selling 1945 novel. Linda (Lily James, in her finest performance yet) and Fanny (Emily Beecham) are upper class English cousins who enter adulthood in the 1930s with society’s expectations outnumbering their opportunities. Time passes easily, with marriages, children, and unlikely detours, but the cost and struggle always shadows the often farcical county house life and romantic interludes. With a bonkers supporting cast – including Fleabag’s Andrew Scott as a bohemian aristocrat – the central characters are irrevocably tied together even as they struggle at the seams of convention. Mortimer directs the hell out of this concise limited series, using nimble camerawork to convey the weight of the choices facing the two women so that by the finale you have a portrait of their lives whose light touch delivers the most demanding of burdens. Track this show down.
>> Further Reading: I recently covered two highly recommended new shows for The Age – the Paul McCartney interview series McCartney 3, 2, 1 on Disney+ is an absolute pleasure [full review here], while Binge’s Reservation Dogs, a bittersweet comedy about four Native American teens looking to flee their hometown, is salty and unpredictable [full review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Based on a true story and boasting a definitive Jennifer Lopez performance, Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers (2019, 109 minutes) is a compelling crime drama about ambition and success for the working-class women so often on the margins of the genre; Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019, 97 minutes) is an defining documentary portrait of the life shared by Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, who was so much more than his muse.
New on Stan: On the comeback trail, Robert Downey Jr was at his mercurial best in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005, 103 minutes), a typically acerbic Shane Black action-comedy about a petty thief who ends up cracking a Hollywood conspiracy; the ground-breaking life of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is rightfully detailed in the thoughtful and enduring documentary RBG (2018, 99 minutes).
New on SBS on Demand: If you’ve been watching Mike White’s The White Lotus on Binge (and you should be), then you can get an earlier taste of his ear for American social satire with Beatriz at Dinner (2017, 78 minutes), a prickly dinner table drama about a progressive therapist (Salma Hayek) who finds herself unexpectedly breaking bread with a rapacious billionaire (John Lithgow) who refutes her every belief.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Stan’s outstanding new Jean Smart comedy Hacks and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s eclectic Apple TV+ drama Mr Corman.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 324 series reviewed here, 162 movies reviewed here, and 41 lists compiled here.
