Binge-r #257: On the Verge + Vigil
California Dreaming: Alexia Landeau (Ell), Elisabeth Shue (Anne), Sarah Jones (Yasmin), and Julie Delpy (Justine) in On the Verge
ON THE VERGE S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All 12 episodes now streaming
The French actor Julie Delpy has distinguished herself as a versatile, enquiring filmmaker over the last 15 years, whether working in her native tongue (2011’s Skylab) or English (2012’s 2 Days in Paris). For her first series she’s looked to bring her defining traits – probing conversation, cultural friction, a frankness about how women age – to a familiar genre and destination: a highs and lows tale of four female best friends trying to make sense of their lives in contemporary Los Angeles. You’re not alone if thinking of Sex and the City, and Delpy isn’t afraid to lean into the comparison. Her character, Justine, is a chef working on a cookbook, which means voiceover commentary as she types her manuscript. Except that Justine falls into a fantastical ramble that spirals out of control. There’s no pert question to sum up her conundrum, just a lingering sense that life’s big questions are too big to answer.
Even with a humorous slant, Delpy’s women can have demanding edges to their outlines: Yasmin (Sarah Jones) is wound so tight that she has a panic attack when a prospective employer tells her that at 46-years-old she’s aged out of the position, while Ell (co-writer Alexia Landeau) lives through consensus by crisis, looking at a life with three children and money difficulties with bewilderment but little purpose. Justine herself is the put-upon wife of Martin (Mathieu Demy), a Frenchman unimpressed with Los Angeles and his wife’s endless efforts; halfway through the second episode I wrote “please kill Martin” in my notebook. All of this, including the fact that children’s fashion designer Anne (Elisabeth Shue) is often happily high, has a bracing but organic feel. Delpy understands messy lives, and how they can keep going forward when it looks easier to fall apart.
She brings a curious eye to Los Angeles mores, with Justine best seen as a transplanted local still perplexed by a city where her son explains that his school class was training for “a human-made emergency”, and then makes some gunshot sounds to illustrate the point. She’s more savage in her personal farce than her public critique, with a dinner party teetering on the edge of collapse in one episode as the setbacks keep adding up. Not everything ties together here, but what Delpy give On the Verge is an off-kilter awareness – this is not a show that came from a writer’s room and veteran showrunners. The title alludes to both welcome change and worrying loss, and perhaps a sharper edge might have been worth exploring. As Justine writes of a dish, “the darker the bits, the more flavour it will give.
Breaking the Waves: Suranne Jones (Amy Silva) in Vigil
VIGIL (Binge, all six episodes now streaming): This kind of pared-down, consistently escalating crime thriller, where not even a moment of contemplation is wasted in terms of advancing the plot’s ramification, might just be what British mainstream television does best right now. Like Netflix’s Bodyguard [full review here], this at sea murder mystery keeps you on the cusp of a definitive answer, starting with the death by overdose of a sailor in a British Navy nuclear submarine. With the military deterrent on patrol, a police detective dealing with her own issues, Amy Silva (Suranne Jones), is seconded to the complex, compressed tube, encountering a world she doesn’t know and hidden motivations all too familiar. A second enquiry on shore, led by Amy’s colleague, Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie), adds to the lattice-like plot, with Tom Edge’s show racing past the improbable with tense confrontations and perpetual revelations. There’s not a lot here that will resonate afterwards, but it is expert in making you want another episode immediately.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a wonderful chameleon of a screen actor, but there’s only so much she can do as a John Wick stand-in carving her way through Tokyo in the bloody action film Kate (2021, 106 minutes); James Mangold’s Identity (2003, 90 minutes) is an effective ensemble cast thriller – John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta, and more star – where the characters get killed off in reverse billing.
New on Stan: Martin Scorsese came to Boston for The Departed (2006, 158 minutes) a pithy gangster movie about masks and motivation adapted from the Hong Kong original with Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson; Holy Motors (2012, 116 minutes) is an eruptive and episodic treatise on screen creativity by the renegade French filmmaker Leos Carax, with the great Denis Lavant as a Zelig-like provocateur at work in Paris.
New on SBS on Demand: Adam McKay’s Vice (2018, 128 minutes) is a scathing if wayward political satire about Dick Cheney (Christian Bale, his intensity rendered mute and malignant), the dour politician who attained destructive power as George W. Bush’s Vice President, and also a potted history of modern comedy as it swings from Monty Python madness to Veep-like farce to explain its singular subject.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Binge’s women of Washington D.C. 1990s drama Impeachment: American Crime Story and SBS on Demand’s bittersweet micro-comedy Iggy & Ace.
>> Want BINGE-R sent to your inbox? Click here for the weekly e-mail.
>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 334 series reviewed here, 162 movies reviewed here, and 41 lists compiled here.
