The Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime):
This is one of the greatest cinematic experiences of all time. After spending 10 precious hours of my life on Barry Jenkins’s certifiable masterpiece, I am rendered numbed and speechless. I can only say this for those who have yet not seen this monumental classic: go for it immediately, your life and your understanding of human suffering will be profoundly enriched. Set in the 19th century in the thick of slavery in the plantations of Southern USA, The Underground Railroad is the story of a very young very determined girl named Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and her repeated resilient attempts to escape slavery. I don’t know how much Cora suffered within herself. But her physical torture is beyond endurance for us.
Some of the episodes came with a warning about graphic violence. Still, nothing, absolutely nothing prepared me for the savagery of the violence perpetrated on the black people. God, it seems, is busy elsewhere. In case you have forgotten how cruel humankind can be to the weak, The Underground Railroad is a rude reminder. A savage nudge to the power games that continue to commandeer relationships between the rulers and the subjects, the latter now known in democratic countries as the electorate. Call them by any name, Cora for that matter. The urge to suppress subjugation and disempower the underprivileged is not a thing of the past. This is what makes Cora’s brave run a true hero’s tale.
We are all running from those who misuse power to show us our place. There is a sequence in Chapter 1 where a runaway slave is brought back chained to a scaffold and burnt alive as the white guests watch as though at an entertainment parlour. By now you must have guessed this series is not for the weak-hearted. Many times I was seriously tempted to give up watching the sheer brutality on screen. But The Underground Railway won’t let you go. Barry Jenkins whose study of black homosexuality in Moonlight won him the Oscar for best picture heaps the horrors unvarnished. But here’s the thing: the violence is not done for effect.
When Cora is whipped mercilessly every whiplash falls on all of civilization, back white brown yellow….The shame of Cora’s violation is for keeps and all. All of the civilization would bear the scars of her wounds until civilization exists. The railroad refers to the actualization of an imaginary network of underground Black relief that existed for runaway slaves. Here the railroad becomes a reality. As Cora flees from one town to another her story acquires the immediacy of a parable told in the language of newspaper headlines. As she runs we pray. But there is no escape from the darkness.
Till the end, Cora remains a persecuted hounded fugitive. Glimmers of love and hope (her companion Caesar, played with superb poignancy by Aaron Pierre, when she first from flees captivity, her haunted companion Jasper played with bleeding despondency by Calvin Leon Smith as she is apprehended the first time, her last chance at love and companionship when she meets Royal played by William Jackson Harper at a Black commune) are firmly snuffed out. Be warned. The heroine in The Underground Railroad gets no justice or redemption. For that, you will have to wait for lesser cinematic experiences, the ones that offer false hope. Barry Jenkins has no solace or salvation to offer his heroine. Cora’s hunter, the slave catcher is a far more powerful character than Cora. You won’t be able to take your eyes off Joel Edgerton as the slave catcher or for that matter young black Chase W Dillon as Edgerton’s trusted boy-Friday. These two represent red-hot evil. They remind us that good only triumphs in the fictional world.
The Underground Railroad is a work of ceaseless wonder. It brings Colson Whitehead’s novel to shimmering life, creating images that are from the book and yet far beyond. Pain, suffering, trauma, and nervous anxiety are its guiding forces. But the presentation is macabrely magical. You can’t take your eyes off Cora’s suffering. This work of art legitimizes suffering as the predominant elixir for artistic excellence.
Mare Of Easttown (Disney-Hotstar):
Mare Of Easttown is that rare series that sucks you so deep into the life of the characters you feel their conduct is your responsibility. At one point in the storytelling, a young father walks towards his infant baby’s cradle. He has lately gotten to know that he is not the baby’s biological father. As the young man trundled to the cradle I held my breath. What was he going to do? When he picks up the baby and cradles it, I heaved a sigh so loud my neighbours must have woken up. The young man with genetic issues is played by a little-known actor named Jack Mulhern, who is the conflicted father of Erin’s baby. Erin, played by Cailee Spaeny, is murdered in the first episode. Another girl is already missing for a year when the series opens. It’s all a bit of a mess that is simmering right under the tranquil surface of Easttown. Director Craig Zobel and his writer Brad Inglesby keep a tight leash on the proceedings, loosening their group somewhat to let in the vibration of rumours and scandals that small-town folks often indulge in when boredom strikes (which is quite often). Some of these ….shall we call them titillating transgressions… are monstrously funny, though we are hardly given a chance to stop and giggle. Strangely the two most amusing moments in the 7-hour spree of excellence both have to do with a minor character, a senior citizen Glenn Carroll (played by Patrick McDade).
In the second episode, his wife Betty calls our detective heroine Mare to investigate a pervert’s misdemeanor. The perv has painted abreast on the wall outside the Carrolls’ home and captioned it ‘Betty’s Breast’. Husband pacifies her, ‘Why are you upset? It(the breast sketch) doesn’t even look like yours.’Later, much later, when Betty dies(the actress Phyllis Somerville who played Betty passed away) the husband makes a big announcement after the funeral confessing he had an affair with Mare’s zany mom Helen(Jean Smart, brilliant brilliant!). Mare dies laughing on hearing this confession of her mother’s little adventure.
This is a series where the minor characters are major assets. Every person I met in the series is a living entity in my mind. None more so than Mare…the film’s towering protagonist with a permanent limp and an indelible scowl. Mare never smiles, and it’s not because young girls are missing or murdered. Her backstory is a litany of concurrent tragedies piled on one after another including a son who killed himself. And now Mare is fighting a bitter battle with her grandson’s biological mother for custody. Mare also has a daughter (Angourie Rice) who is lesbian. But I don’t think the daughter’s sexual preference figures in Mare’s list of problems. I don’t think I saw Mare smile even once except when her detective partner Colin (Evan Peters) asks her out for a date. Another prospective date (GuyPearce) asks Mare if anyone has ever done anything for her. Mare looks a little surprised by the question as if she never thought about it. Kate Winslet’s Mare is no mere creation by chance. A lot of thought has gone into playing the character.
This is a performance that will be discussed at acting schools for generations to come. Evan Peters, by the way, is so wonderful as Mare’s sleeping partner (no pun intended) that I wanted Mare to be kinder to him. But then she is not even kind to herself. Of course, Kate Winslet makes this series the milestone that it is. But others have also contributed in equal measures in giving it the tone and texture of a relentlessly absorbing murder mystery where the blood never spills over and tears never get a chance to dry.
Modern Love (Amazon Prime):
The second-most stupid comment I’ve read on this modern-day bouquet of takes on that thing called love, is ….the 8 stories are uneven in quality. The most stupid comment: Season 1 is better than Season 2. Firstly, of course, the stories are uneven in quality. These are not rotis being rolled out in a kitchen, they are different stories about different facets of love, hence you may like one better than the other depending on which way your cookie crumbled when your heart rumbled and fumbled. And of course, the first season is always better. It’s known as nostalgia. Modern Love Season 2 is every bit as kaleidoscopic and stirring as Season 1 with some great acting in all the stories, barring one. It is a mere coincidence that the first story On a Serpentine Road, With the Top Down(yes every story has a quirky title) about a middle-aged woman’s grieving abiding attachment to her 35-year old convertible car is helmed by Minnie Driver. She drives not only the precious convertible but also the story forward with a performance so naked in its emotional truthfulness that I could feel her hurt all through. This is a film about letting go…or rather, not letting go of your memories and how wrong people are in saying that time heals the pain of bereavement.
Minnie Driver shows us a path of hesitant salvation in the dark tunnel of bereavement. Don Wycherley and Tom Burke as her present and past husband are also very convincing. The only other story of this ambrosial anthology about mortality is the last film A Second Embrace, with Hearts and Eyes Open in which the brilliant Sophie Okonedo plays a single mother of two lovely little daughters who finds herself drawn close to her estranged husband(Tobias Menzies) after she is diagnosed to be terminally ill. The story of a broken body and a broken marriage healing simultaneously is well worth telling. And Okonedo is incredibly believable in her role. The breathlessness of first love, albeit between two young girls Katie and Alexa, is amply captured in the story Am I...? Maybe This Quiz Will Tell Me. The first flush of love, the verbal exchanges overrunning one another, the sheer madness of rampageous hormones are all there. Above all, there is the captivating Lulu Wilson as Katie. She is a prized find. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. While the lesbian story worked for me, the gay story How Do You Remember Me left me cold. It’s all about a painful reunion on a busy New York sidewalk on a sunny afternoon between two men who had a one-night stand.
The characters are phony, the two main actors Marquiz Rodrigues and Zane Pais behave like models in a condom commercial, and the style of storytelling is unnecessarily complicated. When you have only half an hour to have your say, you don’t fool around with the form and content. You tell it….errr…straight, even if it is a gay love story. Only one story Strangers On A (Dublin) Train refers to the pandemic. Two charismatic stars Kit Harington and Lucy Boynton play Michael and Paula who meet-cute on a train. While they get to know each other during the journey, a co-passenger sings a cute meet-cute song on the guitar just to pre-empt our cynicism. By the end of the journey, you expect phone numbers to be exchanged. Instead, Michael does a When Harry Met Sally, and the two decide to meet at the station two weeks later. But God, the pandemic, and the scriptwriter (in that order) have other plans. The story never had me as invested as Minnie Driver and Sophia Okenodo’s stories.
Harington and Boynton look like strangers on a train rather than potential lovers right till the end. Watch out for Miranda Richardson as Paula’s mother in this Irish gaffe. I preferred The Night Girl Finds A Day Boy about a mismatched couple --she sleeps during the daytime, he sleeps like most people during the night—who try to find a common ground to keep their mutual feelings afloat. The fact that Gbenga Akinnagbe and Zoe Chao look like an incompatible couple helps furnish a hefty hormonal value to an otherwise lighthearted story. An Indian actress Aparna Nancherla plays the heroine’s best friend. That also helped keep my interest alive in this story. The outright no-no for me was A Life Plan for Two, Followed By One, and the dumbest of the engaging octave In the Waiting Room of Estranged Spouses. A Life Plan for Two, Followed By One is about two annoying kids who grow up into two super-annoying young adults played by Dominique Flashback and Isaac Powell who can’t make up their minds whether they want to be friends or lovers. How about a coin toss? In the Waiting Room of Estranged Spouses, a war veteran falls in love with the wife of the man the war veteran’s wife is seeing. This is Yash Chopra’s Silsila made sillier by Garret Hedlund’s eye-rolling performance. Modern Love Season 2 has its slippery moments. But it overrides the iffy interludes. Because you see, in the end, love conquers all.
Maid (Netflix):
From Frame 1, I was hooked to this true-life story of a single mother who takes up the job of a house-help for a livelihood. It’s a tough life. And this admirable series doesn’t make it look easy for our heroine Alex (Margaret Qualley). It is not easy to escape an abusive marriage especially when your partner doesn’t beat you up and there are no surface injuries to flash in the courtroom. The first and second episodes which are the best reminded me of that extraordinary 2018 Irish film Rosie where Sarah Greene was outstanding as a mother of a homeless family. Maid captures the same immediacy and panic, at least at the start as Alex leaves her “emotionally abusive” boyfriend with their 2-year daughter in the middle of the night. I held my breath to know where she, and the series, would go from here. Then the urgency level begins to drop. Homelessness begins to seem like an excuse to pitchfork some of the most …how shall I put it—believably unbelievable characters I’ve seen. These are people who are sometimes kind and sometimes inconsiderate, like all of us. And yet they are not the people I’d want to meet or even get to know.
They are unreliable even to themselves. Alex’s mother (played by the redoubtable Andie McDowell who incidentally is ‘Alex’ Margaret Qualley’s real-life mom) is an impressively irresponsible gypsy who doesn’t have time for her daughter. Alex’s father(Billy Burke) is kinder, more caring and he eventually gives Alex and her little girl Maddy(the adorable Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) a home. But then the writer Molly Smith Metzler decides to transform Daddy into a closet abuser from the past, a shift in tone that is not just unconvincing but a sexist slur only to make the mother’s irresponsible behaviour seem….ummm….morally acceptable. And how far can we trust Alex’s judgment of her father’s conduct from 20 years ago?
Speaking of irresponsible behaviour, try this: Alex after cleaning up a rich BLACK lady’s mansion(please note the in-your-face irony of a white heroine serving as domestic help to a black boss) invites a shy date chosen on an app, to visit her at the mansion whose owner Alex pretends to be. The entire episode rings deeply hollow and completely out of character with Alex’s normal upright self-righteous conduct. On the plus side, in the way Alex’s bonding with her baby girl is chalked out, Maid is suffused with a slender but sturdy warmth. Significantly the child’s father Sean (neatly played by Nick Robinson) is not demonized in the plot. Sean and Alex may not get along. But when it comes to their baby girl they are one. Maid left me with a feeling of curious ambivalence. There is much to be admired in this very successful series, especially Margaret Qualley (remember her from the hard-hitting HBO series The Leftovers) who brings an eerie calm to Alex’s shattered life. I also liked the guy (Raymond Ablack) who secretly loves her and wants to help her. When he offers to lend her a car that he claims is “just lying around” Alex is quick on the uptake. You just can’t trust any man in a series that wants to prove a woman is better off on her own.
The Wheel Of Time (Amazon Prime):
This long-awaited peregrination into the heart and soul of a nostalgic nation, a civilization that exists only in the exacerbated imagination of those who believe in the magic of the universe, is a beast of a feast. Stunning to look at, the series spreading sensuously into eight looming episodes, proves a slog for those of us who do not believe in fairies, elfins, goblins, and dragons, and who think rewarding binge-watching means feasting on The Maid or, nearer home, The Family Man. The forest is full of mysteries. But what exactly does it hide?
The Wheel Of Time transports us into a world where wondrous images coalesce into brutal intimations of mortality. It’s all to do with Aes Sedai, a cult permitting entry to women only that uses magic to save the universe from perilous creatures. Moirrain, played by the ineluctably persuasive Rosamund Pike, is the cheerleader of Aes Desai who must escort four young people, Mat, Egwene, Rand, and Perrin…three boys and a girl…across the universe. The perilous beauty of the forests and mountainsides which carry our young ….shall we call them tomorrow’s hope…onwards into a fantastical future, form a stunning backdrop to what is essentially a grandma’s take, spruced up with heavy doses of seminal philosophy and mythology. There are passages where we are lectured on the beauty of the universe and why it is imperative to not desecrate Nature’s beauty. Some of this psycho-babble is pretty incomprehensible. But hats off to the fetching cast for keeping the proceedings perpetually pungent, perky, and impassioned. It’s not easy to enter into this crypto-magical world. The four young actors who play Moiraine’s quartet of mentors are so into it, they almost seem to be products of the times when forests were flush with monsters and mystique. Mat (Barney Harris), Egwene (Madeleine Madden), Rand (Josha Stradowski), and Perrin (Marcus Rutherford) come across as cogently created nomadic characters who are as timeless as they are time-bound.
Then there is Rosamund Pike at the heart of the panoramic plot, feeding on the fiesta of fabulous visions even while trying to preserve her character’s core individuality from being submerged in the towering landscape. Pike is a dependable ally in the series’ epic excursion. But even she can’t escape the unintended hilarity of some of the scenes, like the one where her platonic travel-mate (Daniel Hanney) gets into a hot tub with her and cribs, “It could have been warmer”.One could say the same about the series.
The Wheel Of Time, for all its timeless visual beauty, suffers from a certain coldness around its heart. Often the discourse is too lengthy and one feels like telling the director to just carry on with the action and stop gabbing over goblins and discoursing over dragons.
Succession, Season 3 (HBO):
Ever since Succession began beaming on HBO in 2018 it has taken the world by storm. The murderous antics of the Roy family are unmistakably galvanic. The Roys mean business. Their brusque brutality in their self-serving world is a delightful antidote to all that we have heard seen and experience in our familiar family zone. The Roys are very Mughal in their determination to usurp the throne even if it amounts to a blizzard of blood spill. Miraculously no one gets killed, although we hear a lot of talk of power-slaying. Season 3 is more murderously Machiavellian than the other two seasons. It starts with the Roy son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) publicly taking down his all-powerful father Logan Roy (Brian Cox) from the business empire’s leadership. The series is handsomely mounted. The family is shown to be lavish in their lifestyle as well as their usurping aspirations. For a large part, the new season is about Logan’s heirs, besides Kendal, younger son Roman (Kieran Culkin), and daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook) trying to grab power. Their serpentine maneuvers are not at all shocking to us. We know enough about the power games that go on in business families to know that this family will stop at nothing to gain power. Admirably the plot is restrained about the limits of avarice.
Every character no matter how unscrupulously avaricious retains a certain core of humanism. And that to me is the series’ redemptive defining core. That apart, the series is directed with a lot of long shots and handheld cameras capturing the sweaty anxiety of a family on the brink. What I sorely miss in this season is emotional equilibrium. The actors seem to have been told to bury their characters’ feelings in the rubble of opportunism. Some of the performances, such as Kieran Culkin as the youngest Roy heir, and Matthew Macfadyen (he reminds of the tainted but brilliant Kevin Spacey) as Shiv’s husband, are brazenly over-the-top, as though to remind us that the wages of sin are hyper-theatrical acting. The series in this season manages to maintain a controlled momentum right till the end. Succession in Season 3 justifies its existence even though most of the characters are hellbent on discrediting themselves, none more so than Brian Cox’s Logan who is a foul-mouthed ruthless reprehensible business tycoon. Quite the role model for the young generation of ambitious wannabe tycoons.
Scenes From A Marriage (HBO):
Is Jessica Chastain as good in the remake as Liv Ullman in the original? Hard to do. But Chastain has done it. She smashes the screen and jumps at you with a feral ferocity that we witness on screen only once in a while. Of course, Oscar Isaac (one of contemporary American cinema’s rising phenomenon) is also a revelation. But somehow this version of Scenes From A Marriage is owned by Chastain. As Mira, she is a volcano about to erupt. Tempestous, tactile, volatile.When she is on the screen (which is 90 percent of the playing time) we can’t take our eyes off her. What is Mira thinking when she tells her house-husband, Jonathan, out of the blue, that she is leaving, going away to Tel Aviv(of all the places!) with her new lover, whom until a few minutes earlier Jonathan knew nothing about? This devastating revelation comes in Episode 2 and that’s where the narrative kicks off (episode 1 is an aimless warm-up with an Indian actress Sunita Mani interviewing the couple on their marriage and the wife Mira pointlessly kissing a female friend in the bedroom at a dinner get-together) conferring on the collapsed marriage a kind of universality that will shake up every married couple, as it did when Bergman created a divorce cyclone 48 years ago.
Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage had triggered off divorce spree in Sweden. I don’t see the remake making any difference to modern marriages. Contemporary couples need no impetus to separate. But they need to watch this highly illuminating take on the anatomy of a failed marriage to know how and why excessive verbal interaction can ruin a marriage. In an audacious volte-face from the original, it is the wife Mira who has an extra-marital affair. In the original, it’s the husband who crosses the boundary. This change in the marital dynamics makes a radical feminist difference to the narrative. Chastain has to guard against being demonized while Isaac must make sure he doesn’t look like a martyr. Both do a wonderful job of keeping their characters on a moral leash without stifling the crackling synergy that makes them so gloriously garrulous.
The series is not instantly likable. Neither Chastain nor Isaac plays their parts for empathy. I have yet to come across a more disagreeable couple on screen. Barring perhaps Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Unlike Dick and Liz, there is minimal physical violence between this couple. This is a couple that can’t live together, but can’t live apart either. They love one another. But they don’t like each other anymore. What do we do with Mira and Jonathan? Each episode begins with Jessica Chastain and Christopher Isaac walking towards the bustling set (masks and all) to assume the on-screen roles of Mira and Jonathan. I don’t know why we are reminded each time that this is, at the end of the day, a make-believe couple. What we see is far from a mock marriage. Frequently, I felt more an intruder than an audience to Mira and Jonathan’s crumbling marriage. It is an unsettling experience.
AlRawabi School for Girls (Netflix):
This is one of the first series in Arabic on Netflix. Its popularity, dubbed as it was in multiple languages and beamed in numerous countries, took even its makers by surprise, catapulting as it did, the whole team to instant fame as the voices of the oppressed Middle East in 2021. Not all the fame that has come the series’ way is deserved. AlRawabi School for Girls suffers from huge lapses of moral rectitude and an enormous appetite for what I’d like to call girlie gossip. Much of the six episodes are devoted to the high school girls’ silly efforts to outdo themselves in a campus gang war. Parts of AlRawabi School for Girls are also extremely violent. These portions are what confers validity to the series beyond its pretty veneer. The plot centers on the ongoing rivalry between the show’s beautiful heroine Mariam(Andria Tayeh) and the campus bully Layan(Noor Taher). Layan is the worst version of a privileged lifestyle in a conservative society. She wears skirts and lipsticks openly and is not answerable for her wild behaviour to anyone
Mariam, on the other hand, though belonging to a seemingly liberal family where the entire family eats together, is shown to be more restrained in her bid to be a liberated evolving woman in a veiled society. Admirably or cautiously, the series creator Tima Shomali makes no references to the religious or cultural repression of an Islamic state. The girls are shown to have bright bouncy party-going lives. From the core group of young female actors (who do a neat job of projecting the series’ spirit of bridled bohemianism), only one is shown to wear a hijab to school.
That girl Ruqayya (well played by Salsabiela) suffers the worst blow when she is catfished by our heroine whose behaviour goes from victim to aggressor over the six sleek but shallow episodes, and not too convincingly. Initially, when Mariam is beaten up by Layan and her girl-gang of yes-women, the series promises to take on the scourge of bullying in the most sensible and sober tones. But then writers Tima Shomali, Shirin Kamal, and Islam Alshomali decide to take the easy route to global success. Instead of portraying repression in a closed society, the series takes on the glib tone of All The Boys I’ve Loved converted into To All The Girls I’ve Hated. Creator-director Tima Shomali seems to be unsure whether she wants to make a chick flick or something more serious and unflattering to the community and society where young women are still trying to find their bearings vis-à-vis the western hemisphere.
Given the oppressed social structure in which the characters are supposed to function, the uninterrupted flow of the fluffy-fiesta mood is not only distracting but also to a large extend a disservice to all the women in the Middle East who are trying to find their voices. As a series celebrating emancipatory womanhood AlRawabi School for Girls barely skims the surface of the confounding societal structure, settling for numbing affluence rather than digging deeper into the connection between bullying and patriarchal sanctions.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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