passing-smiles

[passing-smiles]

TV: Clique, ‘Episode One’ (S1E1, 2017)

If, like me, you came of age in Britain in the last ten years, you’ve probably felt the indelible influence of Skins. The show cast a long shadow over our teenage years, supposedly encapsulating a generation - and, if my experience is to be believed, a teen-hood that never quite lived up to what I saw on screen. Jess Brittain, the creator of BBC Three’s new university-set thriller Clique, got her start as a screenwriter on the later series of Skins, and, although the new show goes somewhere very different, its influence can still be felt.

Clique follows two best friends, Holly (Synnove Karlsen) and Georgia (Aisling Franciosi), who have known each other since they were eleven and are now starting at the University of Edinburgh, as they are drawn towards an alluring group of interns under the tutelage of business high-flyer and lecturer Jude McDermid (Lousie Brealey). Of course, it’s not a mundane office drama; part of what makes the clique of interns so alluring is their lavish parties and glamorous lifestyle, which is handled in the (now-)typical teen drama style: neon lights, thumping music, dramatic entrances and hurried conversations in semi-darkness. Skins didn’t follow its characters to university, but you can imagine that if it had, it would have been something like this. Luckily, Brittain clearly has a knack for moving things along at pace, and the movement between frequent parties, mornings after, and the occasional visit to the campus never drags, instead drawing inexorably onwards as Georgia gets sucked into the high-flying lifestyle and Holly gradually begins to suspect the sinister truth bubbling under the surface of the polished veneer. A BBC press release described the show as ‘an uncensored exploration of how being a young woman can feel today’, and from the looks of the first episode, Clique is at its best when it leans into that description - in the first episode there’s barely more than a cameo appearance from a man, and this leaves the show far more room to focus on the relationships between the central women, a refreshing change in any show.

The central relationship in Clique is between Holly and Georgia. Holly is the more bookish of the two, shown as committed to her university work and interested in her subject - it’s her that introduces Jude McDermid - while Georgia is explicit that she’s only taking the course to stay with Holly. TV newcomer Synnove Karlsen gives an excellently nuanced performance as a character who’s flawed but still human, committed to her friend even while potentially jealous of her, although Franciosi for her part plays Georgia as extremely dislikable to the point that without the flashback sequences to their first meeting it would be difficult to see why the two are friends at all. Clearly Franciosi can bring subtlety to that kind of part, as viewers of The Fall will know, but if there’s some human frailty to be found behind the social butterfly act of Georgia it’s missing from this first episode. Of course, there’s a great skill to nuanced dislikable characters, especially female ones, and a great example of this is Louise Brealey’s Jude McDermid, whose first appearance has her denigrating feminism as time-wasting and attention-seeking, assuring her students that they are not ‘special’, and that only hard work will get them anywhere in life. It’s an effective scene, bringing to mind the many talking heads doing the rounds at the moment crowing that minorities don’t deserve ‘special treatment’, and Brealey is excellent at both the power-stance boardroom attitude of the lecture theatre and the furtive cigarette smoker we meet later. For the most part, the interns are left undifferentiated, with the exception of the troubled Faye (sensitively played by Emma Appleton), who is the audience’s first indication that something might be awry with the clique, although it seems like a good choice to keep the titular group as mysterious as possible to begin with.

Skins was revolutionary television - even if you weren’t a fan, its influence on teen programming in the UK has been undeniable - not because it was beautiful or artfully made (although it had its moments) but because of what it was about, and how it portrayed it. Whether most teenagers live a life that resembles those of its lead characters isn’t the point, and the same is true of the university demographic that Clique targets and portrays. Brittain has been clear about the fact that the series isn’t meant to be a truthful depiction of university life - Brittain has been clear about the fact that the series isn’t meant to be a truthful depiction of university life - in fact, there’s already been an article in an Edinburgh student paper about the show’s generic handling of the university - and although it takes the writer’s university experiences as a starting point, it’s in the interests of the show to amp it up to achieve the suspense required for a good thriller. The cinematic techniques used in Clique are by no means revolutionary: apart from a muted scene that’s horribly inverted at the end, much of the first episode doesn’t visually stand out from the standard teen fare on either side of the Atlantic. Clique is also not alone in its unflinching portrayal of the formative experiences of university life, and nothing is ruled out, from sex to suicide. There’s little style, but it’s not missed, because this is a programme that favours substance; it’s about going somewhere and exploring the issues it finds there. It’s not the best thing on television this month, but I’m willing to follow Brittain for at least another episode as she makes a new exploration of the well-trodden territory.

Clique, ‘Episode One’, written and created by Jess Brittain, directed by Robert McKillop. BBC Three, 5th March 2017.

[passing-smiles]

Novel: Autumn (Ali Smith, 2016)

I love Ali Smith; I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed one of her books. How to be both was a highly lauded success, but since reading what was then her latest novel I’ve also shot through and loved There but for the and Girl meets boy, so when I learnt that Smith’s new novel - the first in a projected seasonal quartet - was soon to be released, I came running. And Smith, fortunately for me, has delivered again.

I’ll admit that I don’t read too many books off the ‘new releases’ shelves, so I’ve got little to compare with, but Autumn deals with the events of Summer 2016 so quickly that it seems a strong contender for the title of first true post-Brexit book. It’s not about Brexit, per se, in the sense that Smith’s novels rarely deal directly with many of the subjects they touch on, but the aftermath of ‘the vote’ is a theme that’s taken up again and again in the comparatively short space of the novel. In one memorable scene, the protagonist’s mother sums up the frustration and fatigue many of us felt in the weeks immediately following June 23rd: being ‘tired of the violence there is and ... the violence that’s on its way’, of ‘liars’, ‘sanctified liars’ and ‘lying governments’, of ‘people not caring when they’re being lied to any more’. It’s an eloquent response to the events that were, at the time of writing, fresh at hand, and wrapped in Smith’s trademark wordplay. Even if the novel seems a little light on answers, on where to go next, it’s so thoroughly a response to the period of its writing that I start to wonder how well it will age. Luckily there’s enough of everything else to keep the book feeling like it’s simply a piece of postmodern journalism.

So what is Autumn really about? ‘Everything’ isn’t a very helpful answer to this one, partially because in a review where I’ve already used the word ‘postmodern’ it starts to invite expectations of the heavy and encyclopedic works that have come to dominate the style, and this is not that. Rather, Autumn is light and pleasingly sparse, preferring to drop an idea in your head before darting way, leaving it up to the reader to follow it further into the novel, or pick something else to run with - there’s plenty to choose from. The plot, what there is of it, explores Elisabeth, a History of Art postgrad, and her decades-long friendship with Daniel, her aged neighbor, who is now asleep in a care home where the nurses keep warning that he’s in the last stages of his life. These two characters are Smith’s jumping-off point to explore the world that plot takes us to, and a third major character quickly emerges  in the figure of Pauline Bloty, the founder of British Pop Art and the movement’s only major female figure. Daniel has some kind of history with Boty, and introduces her work to Elisabeth as a child, who goes on to write her thesis on the now little-known and underappreciated artist. Smith’s last novel, How to be both, followed a similar artist-and-viewer relationship and used it to explore women’s place in society of the past and today, but by taking an artist far closer to the present, this time her comparisons are far more direct. It’s not hard to imagine that the art establishment’s treatment of Boty could and does happen today - Smith includes a dialogue Elisabeth has with her thesis supervisor about the lack of female pop artists, in which he refuses to admit Boty’s significance to the genre even when faced with the evidence of her paintings and life, that shows just this.

But Autumn is hardly a novel of politics over plot. Smith knows people, and loves people, even if they’re frustrating at times, and this understanding allows her to craft intricate and subtle relationships throughout her novel. Elisabeth and Daniel are a friendship for the ages, and we see Elisabeth alternately perplexed and intrigued by Daniel, just as we are. He’s erudite and creative, and his influence on Elisabeth is clear, but he never comes off like Ryan Gosling’s character in La La Land; instead, he becomes a rock in Elisabeth’s life simply by representing someone a little different - incidentally, there’s a subtle doubling in a friend of her mother’s introduced late in her life. There’s an early suggestion that Daniel and Elisabeth’s mother are at odds, but rather than an out-and-out antipathy it’s a gentle push-and-pull, and Smith demonstrates this with her usual flair for subtle observation and revealing dialogue (in particular, there’s a single sentence that Elisabeth’s mum says, ‘No, Bob Dylan has always been an international superstar’, that coalesces the difference between her and Daniel perfectly). Another recurring theme of the novel, although not an obvious one, is the mother-daughter relationship, which in the instance of Elisabeth and her mother flits through the novel, never settling into a reductive or straightforward relationship. Elisabeth and her mother are clearly very different people, and can be dismissive of each other’s interests, but even in writing their relationships as adults, Smith maintains a sense of history, of a relationship ultimately founded on love and frustration, and it’s refreshing for me to see that portrayed complexly and realistically. A subtle parallel is drawn with Boty’s life (and death) again, as she refused chemotherapy for a cancer that would eventually kill her in order to carry a pregnancy to term, giving birth to a daughter before dying tragically early at 26. Smith’s novels are shot through with interests in obsessions like motherhood in this novel, but it never feels old; clearly, she’s a writer that’s heavily invested in thinking, talking and writing about these subjects, and that focus gives her the ability to produce increasingly nuanced statements on them.

Autumn is a short novel, and while Smith has long eschewed novels with a clear beginning and end, the novel’s close seems very open-ended in terms of plot, even if the work as a whole is tightly and clearly structured. Whether Smith will return to these characters in the next novel of her quartet is unclear - information about the other three seasonal novels is not forthcoming, and it’s not been stated at this point which season is up next - but it hardly matters, because Autumn is a statement all by itself. For me, it does everything a good novel should; it responds to its time, and to the culture and writing that has gone before; the characters are interesting, complexly drawn, and compelling; the writing itself is skilled, and stylised without being self-conscious. The unabashed stylism could come off as overtly intellectual, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s carried through by sheer self-evident love and zeal, which really sums up for me why Smith is such a great writer: she cares, deeply. There’s no intellectual distance in her writing, even when it draws on deliberate research (as revealed by the acknowledgements). Few novelists can mix the brain with the heart so endearingly, and that’s why I’ll be recommending Autumn, and Ali Smith in general, to anyone that will listen, for a long time to come.

[passing-smiles]

TV: Riverdale, ‘The River’s Edge’ (S1E1, 2017)

When Riverdale was announced, it was easy to be dismissive. It’s the sixth show on the CW in recent years to be adapted from comics, and is helmed by Greg Berlanti of Arrowverse and Supergirl fame, along with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (formerly of Glee, now Chief Creative Officer at Archie Comics). It didn’t help either that the ridiculous description of ‘Archie meets Twin Peaks’ was attached to it everywhere it went; no show, you’d think, could pull that off. But stick around for the first episode and you’ll see that Riverdale has plenty going for it on its own terms.

Let’s be clear: Twin Peaks this is not. One of the things that that show did so well was that it began in medias res, with a large part of the plot being the discovery of what had gone before. There’s little of that in Riverdale, with pretty much every plot having its beginning over the course of the previous summer, when Jason Blossom (supposedly) drowned, Archie had an affair with his music teacher, and Veronica Lodge’s father was arrested for fraud. The episode’s opening sets up the death, with narration from Jughead - now cast as a withdrawn novelist-come-reporter and played by Cole Sprouse - and a set of brief but illuminating flashbacks reveals Archie and Geraldine Grundy’s history, but rather than lingering on these starting points, the episode just keeps going, squeezing in more than enough plot points to power the entire series. There are times when it feels like the writers are overplaying their hands: Betty’s rebellion against her mother, for example, is set up and knocked down rapidly, and Veronica’s motivations in befriending Betty are explained as soon as the question is raised. There’s upsides and downsides to this approach; refreshingly, with these kind of things out of the way, the show is free to move on to some less hackneyed plots and tropes, but it also means that emotions have to be brought to the fore unnaturally quickly. Characters have a tendency, especially towards the middle of the episode, to go from speaking calmly to shouting far too quickly, and this doesn’t do any favours to a show that’s unapologetic in its teen-centredness. Going from nought to sixty again and again can be exhausting for an audience, but it’s reasonable to hope that the firm foundations established over this first forty-five minutes will stand the series in good stead to further develop characters and plots that aren’t quite as predictable as the Pretty Little Liars-style stuff in this episode.

Despite the teen-soap writing, some parts of Riverdale are positively well-made. The whole show has a visual panache that’s reminiscent of the one that kept me tuning in to early seasons of Teen Wolf, with bold colours where necessary and great neons against thematic darks. Jughead’s opening monologue has luscious wide shots, fuzzy closeups, and stylised framing; another instance of the Wes Anderson-gone-wrong approach that’s beginning to pop up all over Netflix. There’s some defiant colour-grading that seems to be ripped straight from the work of a good comics colourist, with hazy summer yellows, washed-out greys, and suburban whites. Fittingly for a character - Archie himself wants to be a musician - and franchise that’s always been intertwined with music, pop soundtracking is almost ubiqutious. Josie and the Pussycats put in an appearance and so does Archie’s own writing, but scarcely a scene goes by that doesn’t have some kind of synthpop backing to it. When it’s taken away, though, the silence is thoughtful, and not accidental. Riverdale won’t be getting compared to Hannibal in terms of aesthetic beauty any time soon, but it would be a mistake to think that the cinematographers, production and lighting designers aren’t pulling their weight here.

I think it’s important, too, to view the show in relation to its source materials. The Archie back-catalogue consists largely of shorter gag strips, along with serialised soap-style storytelling in Life with Archie, but the ‘New Riverdale’ initiative, started in 2015, is designed to bring these teen comics back to their original target audience: teens. Mark Waid on Archie has provided a fresh spin on the Betty/Veronica feud, and one that avoids their entire relationship being predicated on Archie, and Chip Zdarsky on Jughead has quietly canonically confirmed its lead character as asexual. Outside of New Riverdale, Aguirre-Sacasa himself has made bold strokes with his horror reinventions, Afterlife with Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Riverdale is heavily indebted to these comics for providing a foundational belief for the show to exist on: not only can these characters, who are actually older than their current writers, be reinvented, but they should be, because the Archie whose comedic mishaps were so successful in the thirties just can’t cut the mustard in the Instagram age. It’s hard to imagine a show where Archie, the definiton of the pure and all-American teen, has had an affair with his teacher, where Betty and Veronica are not just best friends but Veronica actually attempts to help Betty establish a relationship with Archie, where Kevin Keller, a gay man, is a lead character, and where Archie and Jughead are no longer friends, without the work that’s been done on the page over the last few years. This is a comics adaptation, then, that’s thoroughly in touch with what’s going on in the comics themselves, rather than the other way around. For me at least, that’s a welcome change.

There’s some things to be skeptical about in Riverdale, apart from notions of ‘quality’; writers have indicated that the much-lauded canon of asexual Jughead won’t apply to the show for the first season at least, and, aside from Josie and the Pussycats’ tiny appearance in this episode, Riverdale’s a very white town indeed. But considering what the show’s creators have already gotten right, I think it’s only fair to give them the chance to better themselves over the season. It’s good fun television, at the very least, and I enjoyed it enough to tune in again next week. Isn’t that all it has to do?

[passing-smiles]

Comic: Batman #14

‘But this night, right here... tonight. Look at it, Bat. It’s a diamond. It shines.’

For me, the standout of DC Rebirth has been the selection of Tom King as Scott Snyder’s replacement on the now twice-monthly Batman. A year ago, King was working on DC’s ill-fated Omega Men, his creator-owned Sheriff of Babylon for Vertigo, and the critically acclaimed The Vision at Marvel. Now he’s bringing the same sensitivity and innovation to bear on one of DC’s biggest properties, and recent tweets indicate an upcoming series on an as-yet-unnanounced DC property. Following the conclusion of the excellent ‘I Am Suicide’ with Mikel Janín and Sheriff collaborator Mitch Gerads taking the art reins, I was looking forward to a change of pace, and once again the pair have delivered in spades.

‘Rooftops, part one’ finds the Bat and the Cat savouring their last moments together before Catwoman goes away for life on murder charges established in the previous storyline. In contrast to the big screen heroics of ‘I Am Gotham’ and the black-ops action of ‘I Am Suicide’, ‘Rooftops’ is admirably intimate, the whole focus of the issue being the difficult relationship between the billionaire vigilante and the troubled super-thief, setting their romantic evening against the eternal backdrop what Batman says is ‘most nights’: fighting, training, planning. I’m a relative stranger to how this relationship has been characterised over time, especially in the New 52/Rebirth era, but what we’ve already seen in King’s previous issues serves as more than enough foundation for a comic that’s tender and human in all the right ways. This is what King does best: whether he’s writing about sythezoid families, alien terrorist-stroke-freedom-fighters or traumatised rich kids who dress as night animals to fight crime, he is always writing about the people beneath the cowls. Yes, his formal control is breathtaking, and the synergy he acheives with different artists is a joy to see, but what keeps me picking up King’s comics week after week is that he doesn’t need to have his characters take off their masks for us to see through them.

This issue also shows off a writer-artist pair at the top of their game. King is an a devoted explorer of the nine-panel grid, but in these twenty-four pages the pair use every page and panel to its full potential. Just one page into the issue is a striking double-page spread of almost cinematic framing, setting the all-too-human protagonists against the vastness of the Gotham city sky. In amongst pages that are bordered by the ever-present white gutters, it’s a jarringly widescreen moment, but also the apotheosis of the decompression elsewhere in the issue - rather than taking up two or three spaces in the grid, this one kiss takes a full two pages. The focus is firmly on the dynamic, now; though there are fights in the issue, they’re almost offstage. The double-page spread is followed by more decompression, as the lingering afterburn and eventual turn away of the kiss is set across five widescreen panels. These widescreen panels are the default setting of the issue, which seems to suit Gerads just fine, as he keeps his lens firmly on the faces of the two protagonists. Another inspired moment is the fight montage, where another double-spread is divided into an eighteen-panel grid, alternating between minor villain cameos and the ever-present Bat-signal. For this issue Gerads is on colours too and here he mixes violent red backgrounds with the signature Batman blues and greys to great effect. These are all examples drawn from the first half of the issue: I suspect that relatively soon we’ll be seeing full critical breakdowns of every page as King and Gerads continue to explore each other’s skills throughout.

I’m wary of over-analysing this issue, because it’s a rare thing to read a single installment of a comic and be left as content as I was after finishing Batman #14. There are a lot of skills required on a series with as much as heft as Batman: a vast audience, bolstered by film franchises, television productions, and readers who started with other writers, along with a lead character of such cultural standing that he seems to mean something different to everyone. Batman comics oscillate between the cerebral and the action-packed, the light and the shadow, but King and Gerads in ‘Rooftops’ show every sign of being perfectly in control of what Batman means to them, and King at large is increasingly clearly not just the writer the Bat needs, but also the writer he deserves.

[passing-smiles]

Comic: Hawkeye #1

‘Excuse me, I’m here to make a desposit. Do you accept... sass?!’

Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero have some big shoes to fill. Fraction and Aja’s 2012-2015 run on Hawkeye has justly gone down as one of the greatest Marvel comics of recent years, and Jeff Lemire and Ramon Perez’s All-New Hawkeye has continued the series’ affection for mixing street-level superhero antics with thoughtful and innovative storytelling. This time round, with Clint Barton sidestepping the limelight into Occupy Avengers, Kate Bishop is getting the attention she deserves, and Thompson and Romero are already showing signs that we have another Hawkeye classic in the making.

Any first issue has a lot of work to do, between introducing plot and setting up character relationships while telling a story that’s engaging on its own terms, but Thompson’s set-up is clear and brief, leaving more space for her wry humour and a plot that never feels like a pilot issue. Kate Bishop moving to the West Coast is a plot that’s been used before but it doesn’t feel rehashed - she’s always been the kind of character that moves around a fair bit, and after what we saw of their relationship in All-New Hawkeye and Clint’s actions in Civil War II, it’s understandable that Kate would want to head back to California - and in a solo setting she gets more space to shine. It feels like superhero to private investigator is an established career path these days (even Kate remarks in the issue that ‘super hero slash private eye is the new hotness’), with Spider-Woman giving up the lycra and the return of Jessica Jones, but again it feels like a natural step for a character that’s long been about helping the little people. A neat touch that helps to mark the book out is the use of targets around objects as Kate notices them, which is introduced early, and gives us a more literal sense of how Kate sees the world. Kate’s narration is bang-on character, too, and the dialogue is snappy enough to carry the plot at the pace it demands. Of course, not everything is as sunny as the Venice beach weather, but there’s a great control in the way the issue moves back and forth between seriousness and humour, plot and action.

Romero’s line art is wonderful too, resembling Aja’s work with Lemire without being derivative: the ligne claire simplicity leaves plenty of room for bold characterisation and clever visual storytelling. Romero seems at home with a huge variety of layouts, from nine-panel (or more) grids to action-packed double spreads, even a combination of the two in the middle of the issue, meaning that every page reads as dynamic without being tiring, and the pacing is varied nicely too. Something I particularly like is the full-width panels that represent Kate’s camera viewfinder, with most of the panel solid black around the cropped image; it’s a wonderfully simple technique, extremely reader-friendly, but feels fresh and playful too. I’m not familiar with much of Romero’s previous work, but I’ll be seeking it out soon enough, as I’m really interested to see what else he can do with this kind of quiet innovation.

Even as the book becomes a Kate Bishop solo series, this book really feels like a time production, with Thompson and Romero joined by stellar colourist Jordie Bellaire and letterer Joe Sabino. Bellaire and Romero were first teamed up on Doctor Strange Annual #1, and they make a great team, with Bellaire’s colours melding seamlessly with Romero’s linework. A colourless sample in the recent edition of Previews makes Bellaire’s mark all the more evident: the colours are by turns bright and Californian, then subtle and understated. The slow transition into evening across a grid in the centre of the book is a moment I’d single out as being indicative of the essential importance of a colourists to comics, conveying real-world information like time of day as well as smoothly transitioning the mood of the scene. It would have been easy to over-use the ‘Hawkeye purple’, especially with a protagonist out of costume most of the time, but Bellaire shows great restraint and skill in reserving it mostly for the Kate’s-eye targets. Sabino’s font choices also make a valuable contribution in their understatedness; sound effects are never overdone, but cleverly used, like the way the ‘eee’ of an alarm continues off-panel).

Something that gets mentioned more than once in the comic is Kate’s past as members of teams, both ‘Team Hawkeye’ and the Young Avengers, but with Marvel paying increasing attention to their under-appreciated female superheroes, the time has never been better for her to take over as the titular Hawkeye, and it’s a joy to discover that this looks to be a book that will be living up to the character’s potential. There’s a lot in this issue to like, and with several potential plot threads already in motion, Hawkeye will be heading straight to my pull list and staying there.

[passing-smiles]

Novel: Troubling Love (Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein, 2006)

‘Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense: at least, mine was like that.’

Elena Ferrante’s first novel, Troubling Love,  (L’amore molesto in Italian) is far shorter than each of the Neapolitan Novels, the wide-ranging quartet that’s earned her international critical acclaim in 2016, and much more focused in subject. Where the Neapolitan Novels cover a lifetime of history, politics, and friendship, Troubling Love takes place over little more than a few days, returning to events in the past obsessively, continually relighting and redrawing them.

As I was reading the novel, the only thing I could think to compare it to was George Simenon’s Maigret novels; they have the same relentless plotting, the story being a tightly-wound thread that the psychological aspects of the novel are hung from. There is the same economy of language, too, although while both appear equally spare, Ferrante’s control of technique is much more subtle than Simenon’s. With Ferrante, a difficult technique can sometimes slip by unnoticed, nestled within the voice of the narrator, and a vision of the past or future can sit side by side with detailed and familiar description, especially when rendered with such spare beauty by her eternal translator, Ann Goldstein. Of course, with Maigret, everything ties neatly at the end, but while the events of Troubling Love do reach a conclusion, it’s one mired in doubt and misrecollection. The author’s biography on the back leaf of the book says simply that ‘Elena Ferrante grew up in Naples’; this is no surprise. Knowing the territory as well as her characters enables this duality, and allows Ferrante to superimpose the imagined and the remembered over the present. It’s easy to imagine Ferrante herself walking the same path her protagonist follows, collecting the raw data she needs to stoke the psychological fire that burns on every page of this novel.

Troubling Love, like the Neapolitan Novels after it, rereads itself chapter by chapter; there are several twists in the narrative, which are like summiting a hill and finding the town below you looking suddenly strange. However, while her later opus makes the reader aware of its multifaceted nature by introducing real-world social and political movements, and introducing the narrator herself as a writer, Troubling Love is a true thriller, rereading itself by suddenly filling in new information, forcing the reader to reconsider the relationships between the characters in the novel and the history they share. Other writers have written on how Ferrante’s work forces us to reappraise ‘chick lit’, and I would argue that in this novel Ferrante does something similar for dime-a-dozen thriller, using some standard conventions - the dead mother, the mysterious personal history, the close attention to detail - to craft an undoubtedly literary work. It’s worth noting that in this novel, too, the protagonist is an artist, this time drawing cartoons for a living, and her father a painter, and ideas about the worth of popular art come to light in the second half of the book: Ferrante knows what she is doing.

Another perpetual Ferrante interest is the relationship between men and women, which comes into Troubling Love somewhat unexpectedly. The novel purports to be about the relationship between a daughter and her dead mother, and it certainly starts out that way, but it quickly becomes clear that the protagonist’s own relationship with mother has always been informed by their relationships with men. I don’t wish to spoil the book for anyone, as part of the pleasure comes in watching this relationship unfold over time, and the narrator’s own realisations of complicity - in seeing her mother as a sexual object, and in seeing her own relationships in sexual terms - are part of what makes the book so startling an analysis of sexual politics, but it there is a certain kind of horror to watching protagonist who doesn’t sit apart from the knot she is unpicking, finding herself instead tied up in it and struggling always to escape.

On the strength of her latest work, Ferrante has been (I think rightly) hailed as a bold and important voice in international fiction. But the epic scale of the Neapolitan Novels doesn’t mean that we should overlook her achievements, as Troubling Love succinctly demonstrates that there is plenty in those slim volumes to fascinate, and even enough to thrill.

[passing-smiles]

TV: Sense8, ‘A Christmas Special’ (Lana Wachowski, 2016)

Please be advised that this review makes elements of plot explicit, especially for the first season of Sense8, and contains references to suicide, hard drug use, and homophobic slurs.

A year and a half ago, Netflix released the first season of a new show called Sense8. Following eight main characters across nine countries and four continents, co-created by a sibling directors known primarily for an innovative genre-breaking sci-fi film along with a TV writer and director with a career that makes him look like the Aaron Sorkin of sci-fi, it was a massive undertaking for a company that was just beginning to make its name and critical opinion seems divided on whether that gamble paid off. I personally very much enjoyed it, but that was 18 months ago, so this ‘Christmas episode’ had a lot to do in terms of bringing me and others back on board, with a second season (of the five planned) scheduled for next year.

The final episode of the first season closed on a hopeful note, but over the course of this episode’s opening it becomes clear that it wasn’t quite the happy ending we might have thought. Almost every main character is in dire straits: Nomi, the trans hacker, is in hiding, Sun, the Korean former businesswoman and martial artist, in solitary confinement, Kala married to a man she does not love and Wolfgang heartbroken because of it, Capheus’ livelihood threatened, while Will, the former Chicago cop, flees from his connection with the killer Whispers into the arms of hard drugs provided by his now-girlfriend Riley. Like everything else in the episode, the opening reminds the viewers strongly of the Sense8 style - each location is handled by a different director, so distinguishing the hand of the director is difficult and possibly pointless, given the importance of collaboration to the work.The drug use is portrayed unflinchingly amidst languishing shots of the sensates underwater, music (as always) playing, and eventually connected also to the violent suicide that opened the first season. This is one of several sequences in this episode and the series at large that goes on perhaps slightly longer than necessary, but also a hallmark of the show’s distinctive style; the creators have always been clear that they have a five-season plan, and a tendency towards visuals in places balances well with the dense action elsewhere. Once the opening sequence is out of the way, the episode progresses very much as we might expect, tightly plotted as always - worth commenting on just for the fact that so few shows actually pull off a plot as complex as that of Sense8.

A gratifying part of watching the first season was seeing the relationships between the sensates grow and change, and even if certain aspects seem slightly forced this time around that aspect remains (the Wolfgang/Kala/Rajan relationship, intially complex is somewhat reduced into a standard loveless-marriage type plot, although a hilarious dual sex scene rescues it from the ordinary). The friendship between Capheus and Sun is particularly gratifying and the transition between actors is playfully acknowledged and ultimately well-handled, even if the new Capheus (Toby Onwumere) is now slightly more like Sun than his predecessor. Probably due to the toll of reshoots, Capheus is slightly under-utilized in this episode, but the real tragedy is what’s happened to Riley (Tuppence Middleton). In the first season, I found Riley Blue amongst the most compelling characters in the show, an artist in an inherently populist medium who is also somewhat withdrawn and shy, but in this special she is basically reduced to a love-interest for Will, keeping him supplied with drugs far harder than those she herself consumed in the first season, basically caring for him, and almost every scene she’s in is either about him, or adding fuel to the never-ending romantic fire of the show as a whole. For me, this was a bit of a let-down; one can only hope that the evident problems with this essentially subordinate relationship are either rectified or worked out within the plot of the upcoming season, not just because it’s a grave misuse of a talented actor, but also because it undermines part of Sense8’s central thesis: that all people, all over the world, are worthwhile, and their problems can be seen as important (in both a narrative and general sense).

Despite its theatrical-film length, this episode isn’t structured like one, and this does give the episode some pacing problems. It’s been noted that the action doesn’t really kick off until half-way through, a full hour in. It seems at times that one episode has been stretched to twice the length, but I think it’s more intelligible to see it as several episodes combined; one advertisement promoted the episode as a Christmas special, a birthday special and a New Years’ special, and the episode does have identifiable sections for each of those descriptors. I also think that it’s worth remembering that this is television, where a more thoughtful episode amongst some action-packed episodes is unquestionably a good thing. The purpose of the episode’s first hour is broadly to set up not just the second but also the following ten episodes, and although the second hour does bring arguments, higher drama and even some explosions,  it also sows seeds that we will hopefully be reaping for many episodes to come. The emotional payoff is far higher for the extended set-up - a scene where Lito’s forced outing is directly compared to Nomi’s coming out, and the eight sensates see the word ‘faggot’ graffitied on his wall as a different personal insult, is downright gutwrenching, while Sun’s smuggled birthday present tugs at the heartstrings and Hernando’s visit to his parents’ grave is similarly touching.

Sense8 has always worn its heart on its sleeve, celebrating diversity and connectedness above all things, but like all good Christmas specials it goes for broke in this episode. Right at the beginning, Hernando expounds on his theory of art as ‘love made public’, and later Kala attempts to explain to her husband how she can feel trapped by others’ circumstances. Everything I tell people about the show was in this single episode: it’s touching, funny, cerebral, visually beautiful at times, contains a frankly lavish sex scene about halfway in, as well as wicked simultaneous party across the globe and several musical montages. Part of the Christmas sequence is even set to ‘Hallelujah’, simply because it does. It’s Sense8. It’s not a perfect show - the writing and acting occasionally falters, it’s not always as consistently gorgeous as it has the capacity to be - but it knows what it is, and it never tries to do anything else, covering its flaws not by misdirection but by total exuberance and absorption in what it does so well. I’ll be waiting for May, and season 2, very eagerly indeed.

[passing-smiles]

Film: Fresa y Chocolate (Alea/Tabío, 1994)

DIEGO: I may be gay, but I’m also religious.

DAVID: I’m a dialectical materialist.

I went into Fresa y Chocolate not knowing anything about it, other than that it was an enormously successful Cuban film and there was something to do with ice cream in it. In some ways, it’s an odd film, but in other ways it’s a classical film; it has this way of setting up an expectation and then subverting it, but what actually happens is very straightforward. It’s not so much a character study as a pointed landscape.

When you make a film in Cuba, resources are necessarily scarce, and this pushes a director to focus on substance over style. Fresa y Chocolate isn’t a visually beautiful film, although it has some lovely colouring and visual contrast, taken straight from the streets of Havana and from the set of rooms that contain almost all the action. Contrast is the name of the game here: tt opens in a bare, dingy hotel room, with a man and a woman, and the beginnings of a relatively chaste sex scene, but everything about the scene will be dismantled over the next five minutes, as a peek through a keyhole cuts us to a more explicit (still heterosexual) sex scene, before we watch the woman from the first scene marry another man. The final contrast is in the set of rooms belonging to Diego, which are packed with cultural offcuts, bursting with colour, and, of course, Diego himself - an intellectually seductive man to contrast the chaste woman of the opening. This contrast is the centrepiece of the film: on the one hand, David, the idealistic communist who only reads books approved by the Youth League, is drawn to the gay artistic outlaw Diego, but on the other, he’s getting over having his heart broken by a woman, and looking for (heterosexual) love.

Of course, his segmentation of seduction works in favour of the film’s popular appeal; previous critics have written of the relationship between Diego and David as a ‘seduction of the mind’, but it might as well be a full seduction. For the first half of the film, though, before the romance between David and Nancy comes into play, it seems like it might be a full-on seduction rather than a purely intellectual one. Most love films, after all, do not position the romantic interest as appealing based purely on their physical attributes, but based on their mind or their personality. For a gay film like Fresa y Chocolate to have crossover potential, the romance has to be seen as transposed rather than direct, but this reading is only partially encouraged by the film. Some of David’s lines to Diego in the final scene even directly quote what he says to his girlfriend in the first, but the final hug doesn’t quite mirror the film’s opening. I’ll not deny that this film occupies an important place in the history of LGBT rights in Cuba, but its reception history in the west seems to be far more akin to its reception in Cuba than you might hope.

However, there’s no doubt in any part of the film as to what the directors want their audience to draw attention to: the place of the LGBT community in post-revolutionary Cuba. David initially becomes close to Diego as a ruse to get more information before betraying him as a counterrevolutionary, but eventually learns that his assumptions about Diego’s politics are unfounded. There’s one scene in particular that explores this, and it’s anything but subtle, with the two men abandoning the discussion of Wilde, Lorca, Donne and Llosa that has provided Diego with a venue for veiled criticism of the Castro regime and openly discussing the politics of the revolution. The film becomes almost Brechtian - a film about politics where the characters discuss politics in its most direct form. There are no camera tricks, no cinematographic sleight-of-hand to push an audience one way or another, just brilliant, candid confession from both characters. Like any good political art, it’s persuasive; you’d be hard-pressed to watch the film and continue to believe that gay men in Cuba are all secret counterrevolutionaries.

There’s also a more subtle undercurrent to the film: a running theme is the purpose of art in a revolutionary worldview. Diego disparages David’s writing as ‘just slogans’; he remarks at one point that propaganda and art are not the same thing. So which is this film? Hard to say. On the one hand, there’s a clear moral, and some of what Diego himself says when convincing David of his socialist outlook wouldn’t sound too out of place on a poster. The directors even appropriate a quote from José Martí, regarded by many as the most unifying figure in Cuban history, at a key point in the narrative. However, with all that’s happening on the main level, it’s easy to miss that the film is also being critical of the Castro regime’s position on art, despite its central position in the first half of the film’s plot (the setting up of an art exhibition). The film comes to no definite conclusion on the matter, either, as we hear nothing about the further development of David’s writing, or what Diego gets up to after leaving Cuba. The film has to end sometime, but in its own subtle way, it leaves the audience with far more to think about than it might first seem. Alea and Tabío certainly share the Third Cinema viewpoint on cinema as a social device, but there’s enough embedded in Fresa y Chocolate to suggest an opposing, more Wildean viewpoint that continues to provoke questioning long after we’ve decided on the directors’ key issue.

[passing-smiles]

Comic: Motor Crush #1

Like most sensible people, I loved what Brenden Fletcher, Cameron Stewart and Babs Tarr did with their run on Batgirl, so when I heard they were getting the band back together for a creator-owned series over at Image I knew I needed to get on at the ground floor. There had been lots of hype on social media too - partially stirred by the distribution of a special zero issue - and it seems like expectations were high for Motor Crush. Fortunately, it didn’t disappoint.

A standout element of the Burnside saga in Batgirl was its ‘millennial’ undercurrent; I can’t think of too many other superhero comics that took social media so much in stride. The result was a comic set firmly in the now, and although Motor Crush is set in the near future, the creators’ ease with incorporating modern technology (not just bleeding-edge, but the kind of thing a regular teenager might well own) makes the setting totally believable  as being only a few years away, if not here already. This is somewhere that the comic really benefits from some excellent design in the work of Tom Muller; the omnipresent newscasts are genuinely well-integrated with the overall form of the comic, rather than tacked on to give the illusion of ‘nowness’. In certain places, the graphic captioning even pulls the reader away from ‘reading’ the comic in the conventional sense, towards ‘watching’ it like we’d watch the fictional newscast, a change that works especially well with the always-dynamic art of Stewart and Tarr.

The art, of course, is stellar, especially in the race scenes. In many ways this was the book’s main draw for me, as I know this team does tricky choreography especially well; their fight scenes are ones I actually want to read, rather than skim over. There are some great pages here, culminating in the first race we actually get to see (not the heavily corporate races we might have expected from the daytime set-up, but a down-and-dirty illegal night race), which is really something special, practically roaring off the page. Nothing is unclear, the layouts are dynamic without being difficult to read, and the art makes plenty of noise in the scenes where dialogue is scarcer. It’s also worth noting that this section is printed on black paper, a neat touch that easily nudges the tone of the book from bright, reality-tv whites to almost neo-noir blacks and greys.

In comics, good writing is often that which seems unnoticeable. That seems like damning a writer with faint praise, but I truly appreciate a comic where the dialogue is natural, the characters are sympathetic and nothing’s overwritten; Motor Crush is one of these simple beauties. It’s writing that’s deft without necessarily being sparse. Even the showman-speak of the race coordinator doesn’t feel grating - it just works with the world. There’s no conceit to the writing, but Motor Crush doesn’t need one. It just works. While we’re on words, though, I’ll note too that the comic’s been re-lettered since #0, bringing the usual font closer to the more stylized one used for the voice of the Catball, meaning that there’s enough to indicate a difference in timbre without disrupting a reader’s concentration. Props to Aditya Bidikar there; it’s under-appreciated work that can make all the difference to the feel of a comic.

Motor Crush #1 is a great first issue for a series that already had quite the reputation to live up to. The scene is set, but there’s quite a bit still to establish - there are quite a few characters in this issue who get very little screen time, so I’m looking forward to learning more about them - and the plot is compelling. I’ll definitely be picking up issue two next month, and hopefully following the comic for a while to come.