It highlights in passing the difference between unwanted and regretted contact, anatomises the multiple manifestations and pervasiveness of entitlement, and holds up to the light our ability to rewrite stories to make bad experiences bearable or put their damage to some use. It demonstrates the subtlety of power distribution and redistribution even within a single conversation. It scrutinises the different forms of consent (Kwame, for example, has consensual sex with a Grindr date, but is almost immediately then assaulted by him). It becomes, as her family and friends and the connections (and disconnections) between them are fleshed out, a meditation on our responsibilities to ourselves and each other. You have to take a moment.Īrabella gradually piecing the night together and substantiating her suspicions is the throughline for the dozen episodes, but each one takes in so much more it becomes almost – but never quite, because Coel’s discipline and sense of structure are as formidable as the rest of her abilities – dizzying. When everything is malleable, where can violation occur? Memory, feelings, are not enough. There’s an awful lot of relativism about. It sums up the contemporary world and sexual landscape Arabella and her friends (aspiring actress Terry and aerobics instructor and heavy Grindr user Kwame, played by Weruche Opia and Paapa Essiedu respectively) live in – the soft contours and shifting boundaries of which they are perpetually navigating in their early 30s. The detached “Huh” she gives to this revelation encapsulates in a syllable the drama’s unique tone and approach – always about 30 degrees off where you were expecting it to come from. The early morning finds her back in front of her laptop with little memory of how she got there except for a vision of a man looming over her in a toilet as a hazily remembered sexual assault takes place. Halfway through her final night of grace allowed by her publisher, she goes out for a break that turns into a night out.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |