Binge’s Love Me roars back on its second outing as Hugo Weaving juggles death and romance

The power of death and its weird, wonderful entanglement with romance and family and new life, is still the driving force behind Binge’s gorgeous Melbourne drama Love Me.

Bob Morley, Bojana Novakovic, William Lodder, Heather Mitchell and Hugo Weaving star in Love Me. Picture: Binge

Nothing really brings people together like death, does it?

You, your family, people you haven’t seen for years – after a wedding, it’s death that pushes us all together.

You unite because you can’t believe the love you’ve lost, or you’re ready to put someone to rest after a good innings, or you’re all there to simply check they’re really dead.

People meet the loves of their lives after their husband or wife dies. Children meet their future partners at funerals, or when they’re out drinking to forget.

The power of death and its weird, wonderful entanglement with romance and family and new life, is still the driving force behind Binge’s gorgeous Melbourne drama Love Me.

While season 2 is opening nine months after the family matriarch (Sarah Peirse) died, leaving our trio of heroes – dad Hugo Weaving, daughter Bojana Novakovic, and son William Lodder – trying to figure out how to deal with her loss, her ghost (quite literally) is hanging over them.

But season 2 is less about grieving and more about the sometimes even harder step, the moving on.

Weaving is in wedded bliss with his second wife (the radiant Heather Mitchell), Novakovic is trying for a baby with the too-handsome-for-words Bob Morley, and Lodder is having a baby with ex-lover Shalom Brune-Franklin.

Though for Lodder, he’s still got another old flame, Mitzi Ruhlmann, on his mind. And as for the father and the daughter, their attempts to move on Peirse’s demise with their beautiful new partners are about to hit some bumps.

Bojana Novakovic and Hugo Weaving in Love Me.

Weaving and Novakovic are once again the standouts in season 2.

Weaving perfectly encapsulates that strangest of creatures – a loving, if slightly useless and slightly nerve-racked, upper-middle class Melbourne father.

Death – in the form of Peirse’s spirit – has still not left Weaving. And he beautifully carries that burden, and that gift, of wondering “what would she think of all this” through the first episodes on Love Me season 2.

He may have told this newspaper’s brother magazine, GQ, that all award shows are corrupt, but they should all give him a gong anyway for this performance,

Novakovic is very charming as our romantic heroine who sometimes doesn’t know when to stop talking. And what chemistry she has with the dashing Morley.

But it’s Heather Mitchell who really steps up to the limelight as Weaving’s almost-mystical, free spirited new wife who – after helping Weaving put away death and the past – is very suddenly confronted by ghosts herself.

Heather Mitchell.

As any fan of Mitchell’s stage work knows – I first fell for her as a snobbish mother in a brilliant 2017 Malthouse production of Michael Gow’s Away – she’s one of the few actors left who has mastered that ancient act of acting with her eyes alone.

Watch Mitchell’s eyes as a woman who banished death with love, sex and fun is forced to deal with it again. Talk about a performance being worth an award or seven.

Lodder is serviceable as the young son learning to be a dad barely out of his teens, still scared from losing a parent a bit too young.

But like season 1, his character seems slightly lurched in both the personality and narrative stakes compared with the rest of his glittering co-stars.

Eryn-Jean Norvill is also very good as Morley’s difficult ex and co-parent. And it’s good to see this most talented of actors on screen once more, instead of the 800th production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Love Me season 2 all in all its first few episodes seems like a very worthy successor to its first outing, and it’s all down to the acting.

This mediation of romance and death is still a winner.

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If death won’t bring your family together, you can always slum for a near-death experience. A good fall down the stairs usually helps.

That’s how the ABC’s latest British export, Close to Me, starts and boy, it’s gripping.

Danish star Connie Nielsen – best known as Russell Crowe’s Roman princess flame in Gladiator and Wonder Woman’s mum in the recent DC movies with Gal Gadot – plays a rather well-to-do woman who can’t remember the past year of her life after a tumble down the steps.

Of course, you know what’s coming next. Who pushed her down the stairs – the seemingly loving husband (Christopher Eccleston) or the best pal she can’t remember having a major blow up with (Susan Lynch)?

And she keeps have sense memories of another lover. Is it the good-looking gardener boy (Jamie Flatters) or her daughter’s very sketchy boyfriend (Nick Blood)?

Christopher Eccleston and Connie Nielsen in Close To Me

Yes, it’s easy to work out how everything will pan out and there’s a little too much of Nielsen running around the house crying and screaming “IT IS ALL LIES!”

But Nielsen does it with a lot of aplomb and a perfect grasp of what it’s like to be perfectly normal one minute, and feel like you’re going completely bonkers the next.

Eccleston – that most morose of Doctor Whos and usually caught up as the working class warrior – is chilling as a seemingly soft, almost weak, hubby who’s clearly up to no good and keep telling his memory-lacking wife loads upon loads of lies.

Blood is very icky, but kind of sexy, as the dodgy son-in-law and Lynch is a very funny sidekick to Nielsen’s very serious noir heroine.

Close to Me isn’t going to change the face of television anytime soon. But if you’re finished the latest season of Vera and still want some Northern mystery, Close to Me has it in spades.

Love Me, Binge. Close to Me, ABC iView.