The Girlfriend Is A Twisted Love Triangle In Plain Sight
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Based on Michelle Francis’ bestselling novel of the same name, this 6-episode psychological thriller is deceptively poignant and fair beneath its crowd-pleasing body, writes Rahul Desai.
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| | Dir: Robin Wright, Andrea Harkin |
| Cast: Robin Wright, Olivia Cooke, Laurie Davidson | | Streaming on: Prime Video | | | THE GIRLFRIEND is about a wealthy and overprotective mother who does not approve of her 20-something son’s new lover; she’s convinced that the young woman is a beautiful but ruthless social climber preying on the sheltered tenderness of her son. This American mother, Laura, is determined to expose the British girlfriend as a classic gold digger; her obsession is just as cold and calculating as the person she thinks she’s after. Robin Wright, who is also one of the directors of the series, plays Laura as a real-world extension of her House of Cards character Claire Underwood. She’s one half of an upscale London power couple, has an open marriage, carries the crippling grief of losing an infant, and is yet to process an affair that almost broke her family. She’s so possessive of her son that there’s oedipal tension — the lip pecks, unusual physical intimacy and umbilical-cord glitches are twisted but normalised by Laura. Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! The Girlfriend is about a girl from a broken family who grows up to sell prime London real estate to wealthy clients. This ambitious young woman, Cherry, outruns a dark past. When she finds the man of her dreams, she immediately senses the hostility of his mother; she’s convinced that the older woman is a cruel and controlling sociopath who’s feeling threatened by the prospect of sharing her prize. But instead of backing off, she decides to fight fire with more fire. She will stop at nothing to protect her relationship — and future. Olivia Cooke plays Cherry by weaponising the warmth of the characters she usually plays; she toys with the preconceived notions of the audience by being as transparent as she is opaque. Cherry is anything but perfect: she’s accused of not only being a toxic ex but also a potential killer. But she’s so possessive of her boyfriend, Daniel, that this becomes the most twisted “love triangle” she’s ever been in. Based on Michelle Francis’ bestselling novel of the same name, the ‘gimmick’ of this 6-episode psychological thriller is that it shows two sides of the same story. Every episode (except the finale) is divided into two perspectives — Laura and Cherry — where similar sequences and events unfold from contrasting points of view. The series has fun with the subtle little variations in the two versions, like (slightly) differing accounts offered during an interrogation. Each version is coloured with distortions and biases; the truth is trapped somewhere in between. Laura sees Cherry the way she wants to see her: a little evil, promiscuous, rude, manipulative and conscious of their rivalry. The parts missing (resulting in jump-cuts) are essentially the parts she erases to justify her suspicions. Similarly, Cherry sees Laura the way she wants to, interpreting their exchanges to suit her own combative nature. When she falls into the water and almost drowns, for instance, she notices Laura standing on the boat and doing nothing about it. But the same incident from Laura’s lens shows the older woman leaping into the ocean to rescue her without a second thought. |
| | The Paper Cracks The Lede, But Not Quite The Entire Draft
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The Paper offers welcome insights into the absurdity of journalism, but it can’t match its predecessor, The Office, for its raw, ungainly quotient of humour. Manik Sharma reviews. |
| | Dir: Greg Daniels, Michael Koman |
| Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Sabrina Impacciatore, Chelsea Frei | | | | “PRINT IS PERMANENT. It’s like true love,” Ned, the naive new editor of a struggling newspaper, declares off-camera in the first season of the mockumentary, The Paper . As Ned says the line, he frantically arranges half-baked ideas about possible stories on his whiteboard. Nothing sticks — literally and metaphorically — until he is forced to turn to page-fillers like Sudoku, and an ill-fitting excerpt from a book published decades ago. It’s a sequence that, otherwise used to exhibit the thrill of journalism, instead, underlines its foundational ailment — deadlines, budgets and the prison of space. On good days, that blank sheet of paper feels empowering and far too short for the piece boiling within your veins. But on most days, it’s a kind of vacuum that must be filled with stories, if not substance. The Paper portrays the pursuit of ‘actual’ journalism as a ruinous romance. It speaks to the times, but not its predecessor's pedigree, in terms of awkward comedy. Domhnall Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, the dogged yet brittle new editor of The Toledo Truth Teller, a city paper flirting with extinction in the age of new media. The paper’s tabloid-ish stories score in terms of numbers, but subscriptions are down, readers are leaving, and there is precious little prestige to hang onto, in a place that is supposed to stand for something more. Ned steps into his new shoes, not with bravura or confidence — he isn’t a career journalist himself either — but with the throbbing aspiration of flipping a sorry tide. His subjects, though, aren’t exactly the sharpest or even fit for the job at hand. “Don’t forget the 5 Ws,” he tells a reporter before he heads out. “What’s that? A gang?” the reporter responds, blank and dumbfounded. Watch all nine seasons of The Office, only on OTTplay. Much like its predecessor, the Truth Teller’s office is a mixed bag of people who behave sanely and those who appear to be returning from the edge of something more colourful than reality. There is Mare (Chelsea Frei), whose bright-eyed optimism is just the right funnel for Ned’s blind visions. There is Nicole, played by the excellent Ramona Young, as the clueless, out-of-groove millennial who seems rather bewildered by most things around her. The highlight, though, is Esmeralda, played by the impeccable Sabrina Impacciatore, an influencer-turned-editorial-head who likens the world to her social media feed: full of people whose attention ought to be farmed, as opposed to brains that can be enlightened with the pushback of a relevant story. But none of these ideological frictions is painted in the seriousness of a world in crisis. Instead, The Paper adopts The Office’s mock tone to try to merge humour with tragedy. |
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