Series ǀ Four blurred – Friday

by time news

Maybe were Three angels for Charly just too little. Not only numerically, but also in terms of character: the series, which was produced between 1976 and 1981 and can be attributed to the so-called Jiggle TV, had a clear focus on the male gaze. The term Jiggle TV was coined in the 70s by an NBC board of directors who used it to paraphrase the protagonists’ buttocks, which are not absolutely necessary for the story, but which are part of the concept. In addition to the “angels” who often investigate in bikini, the two female characters of the homophobic 70s series also belonged Three’s a Company to which the audience should envy the male leading actor: He had pretended to be gay in order, uiuiui, to be able to move in with two hot young single women, one blonde, one brunette! And both always lightly dressed!

With the second wave of the women’s movement, which naturally needed some time to arrive on the boardrooms of the TV stations, the possibilities of female figure constellations were expanded. The triangle became the quartet: four people, four archetypes, each associated with a certain quality. The heroine quartet, which was no longer chosen for hetero-male mainstream tastes, but for a female audience, made it into the series world by 1985 at the latest. With the Golden Girls, which were broadcast in Germany for the first time in 1990, suddenly there were four older women who clearly fell out of the heteronormative attractiveness scheme and who primarily combined humor and humanity.

Sex and the City established the self-confident female clover from 1998 onwards, with slightly different attributes: the thoughtful chronicler, the sex goddess, the naive prude and the career woman. The German director Doris Dörrie put in 2010 in her partially very successful ZDF mini-series Climate change courageously the focus on the topic of menopause and told about four Munich teachers. Lena Dunhams Girls (from 2012) discussed the norms to which women (and men) submit for the first time as critically as the selfishness of Generation Y: their four protagonists were selfish, envious, spoiled New Yorkers – and faithless tomatoes in terms of friendship, too. The squabbles between Carrie and Miranda seemed like cold caffè latte to her.

Almost 20 years later, the French actress, screenwriter and director Julie Delpy is now telling the story of four friends again. The protagonists in On the Verge (on Netflix since September) are between their mid 40s and early 50s, their names are Justine (Delpy), Ell (Alexia Landeau), Anne (Elizabeth Shue) and Yasmin (Sarah Jones), are straight, have international (France) and diverse roots (Yasmin’s father is Iranian, his mother is “Black Panther”) and lives in Los Angeles.

La La Land for women over 40

And this place, this Mecca of the artificial super-rich, has a major impact on the plot: All four seem to have a problem with authenticity above all. Justine lives past her picture-perfect French husband Martin (Mathieu Demy), who smokes like a chimney, who grudges his wife’s success as a celebrity chef – instead of knocking on the kitchen table in the face of his latent misogynous ignorance. The financially clumsy Ell, who has three children of three men from different cultures, defines herself so much through her love stories that a blowjob for a good friend is a natural part of her life. The designer and carefree heiress Anne is mostly stoned. And Yasmin, who was once open to a career as a lawyer, begins to cry neurotically when her meek husband criticizes her.

Delpy’s scripts, which she wrote together with Landeau, above all reveal levels of self-deception: Almost no one in this sometimes quite entertaining story seems to realistically perceive himself or the conditions in which one moves. This is astonishing insofar as conventional US entertainment cinema usually grants these head-in-the-cloud productions to younger women of the “chaos noodle” type, even leaving it as a sympathetic characteristic to them. Delpy’s heroines are – in part – still sympathetic. But slowly they are realizing that over 40 or over 50 with complicated, interdependent job-family-and-mother-duties, it becomes more and more difficult to actually give everything up and reinvent yourself.

This fact, owed to living with all its constraints (especially in US society), could give the series a bitterness that would make it more serious on the one hand and more serious on the other. However, Delpy usually does without that. Instead, she stages a few shallow gags too many: cat poop-next to-sofa catastrophes, nudes on the verge of a nervous breakdown, half-baked ideas like meeting Justine with the real Delpy, who snows by in the restaurant as an arrogant salad bitch. After all: The great love, conservative end goal and motif of almost all similar productions, remains (at least in season 1) pleasantly blurred in the distance.

On the Verge Julie delpy France / USA 2021, Netflix

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