No thoughts, just The Great British Bake Off

A baking show fit to scroll your phone to, and everything else worth streaming this week.

Great British Bake Off. Picture: Binge

The Great British Bake Off

Binge

In a New Yorker article on the Netflix series Emily in Paris, writer Kyle Chakra diagnosed the rise of “ambient TV” — that is, background entertainment to watch while you scroll on your phone. The Great British Bake Off is to ambient TV what Brian Eno’s Another Green World is to ambient music. For the uninitiated, the premise is simple: home bakers across Britain competing against each other to take out the title of Best Amateur Baker. “Amateur” is key here. On shows like MasterChef, contestants are all too comfortable cracking off gold leaf domes and poreless quenelles — boring! On Bake Off, gateaus collapse, salt is mistaken for sugar, and tiered cakes topple over. You will not think a single thought during this scrumptious, smooth-brain series. Allow yourself to be swaddled by a woman with a thick Mancunian accent, fretting over a split custard. The earlier seasons, when hosts Matt Lucas (Little Britain) and Noel Fielding (The Mighty Boosh) are at their most relaxed and absurd, are the creme de la creme.

Marie Antoinette

Netflix

While we’re talking cake … let them eat it. Sofia Coppola’s fizzy and frivolous Marie Antoinette isn’t for everyone — when it opened at Cannes in 2006 the credits rolled to a chorus of Gallic boos. But for those who couldn’t give a rat’s about historical accuracy (the cast all speak with American accents), and you just want to watch a decadently costumed, spendthrift party girl flounce around the corridors of Versaille, it’s a perfect movie. The film covers Marie Antoinette’s (Kirsten Dunst) life after her marriage to the wimpy, future King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), and ends before her beheading. This is a Coppola film, so naturally, it’s got an excellent soundtrack. It’s all post-punk and New Pop — The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Radio Dept., The Strokes, and New Romantic icons Adam and the Ants. There’s an awesome scene where, after cheating on King Louis with Axel Fersen (Jamie Dornan), Antoinette saunters through the gardens of Versaille to the Aphex Twin song Avril 14th.

Mustang

SBS on Demand

There’s something about director Deniz Gamze Erguven’s fierce and dreamy debut, Mustang, that feels spiritually related to Coppola’s own debut, The Virgin Suicides. The coming-of-age story is about five beautiful orphaned sisters who live in a Turkish village on the sun-dappled Black Sea coast. Though rural Turkey is a far cry away from The Virgin Suicides’ suburban Michigan, both films are about the sisterly bond of young women who are trapped in controlling domestic environments and yearn for adolescent experiences that have been stolen from them. The sisters in Mustang are raised by their conservative grandmother and iron-handed uncle who strip them of their freedoms and lock them inside after they witness an innocent seaside frolic with their male classmates. Their computers and phones are seized; bars are put on windows; virginity tests are administered; and one by one the girls are married off to arranged suitors.

Babyteeth

Netflix

Eliza Scanlen is surely Australia’s next great actor — she met Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh beat for beat in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and gave a heebie-jeebie-inducing performance as Amma in the Emmy-nominated thriller Sharp Objects. She stars in Babyteeth, the feature debut from Australian stage and television director Shannon Murphy as a 16-year-old girl with terminal cancer, who falls in love with an older, druggie street kid (Toby Wallace). Essie Davies plays her mother, a worrywart former concert pianist with a benzo habit which her psychiatrist husband, Ben Mendelsohn, keeps in good supply. The plot points sound like a weepy cancer romance in independent cinema garb, but reserve your judgment. Murphy is an offbeat, confident director, and this movie will take you by surprise.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

SBS World Movies, Tuesday 8.30pm

After decades of being sidelined by The Oscars, Michelle Yeoh will likely take out the best actress prize for Everything Everywhere All at Once. That would be a blow for everyone who didn’t quite get the zany A24 multiverse headrush and is barracking for Cate Blanchett to take out her third gong, but Yeoh is owed her dues. She was astounding in Ang Lee’s masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as an ageing warrior who knows her opportunity to find love is slipping away — but her performance was snubbed by the Academy. This is simply one of the greatest action films ever made. The fight scenes, which were filmed without computer sorcery, are epic. The actors leap from rooftop to rooftop; battle suspended in treetops; and scale walls with a dexterity that makes Peter Parker look like a contestant on Taskmaster.