Somewhere Boy: locked up for 18 years in brilliant, offbeat drama
Somewhere Boy is the weirdest and best new show on television - and everything else we’re watching.
Somewhere Boy
Watch on SBS on Demand
Between this and Happy Valley, it seems like all the best family drama is coming out of suburban Yorkshire. Somewhere Boy is a brilliant offbeat show that will make you wish for longer, and additional, episodes. Without giving too much away (the less you know the better), it’s about 18-year-old Danny, who has been locked up inside his father’s house his whole life. His mother died when he was young and his grief-deranged father kept Danny prisoner in an isolated country home in a warped attempt to protect him from the world, which he says is filled with monsters. The house is frozen in time and Danny’s only connection to the outside world is through classic films like Casablanca and Brief Encounter. In the first episode, his father blows his brains out, and the boy, wide-eyed and gawky, is sent to live in the real world.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Watch at 12.45pm on SBS World Movies
Surely France’s Celine Sciamma is one of the greatest working directors. Between the one-two punch of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Mamam, and her early arthouse entries Water Lilies, Girlhood, and Tomboy, she’s yet to put a foot wrong. “Portrait”, which brought Sciamma’s work to the wider public, is an intensely passionate, clandestine lesbian love story set on a country estate in the remote region of Brittany in the 18th century. Adele Haenel plays the booksmart but sheltered daughter of the house, who doesn’t want to, but must, get married. Her elder sister killed herself rather than accept that same fate. Noémie Merlant (the scene-stealer who played Cate Blanchett’s trampled assistant in Tár) is the artist who has been given one week to paint a betrothal portrait, to be sent off to a wealthy courtier in Milan to decide whether he marries the girl. The women fall in love. It’s all very, “draw me like one of your French girls”.
Happy-Go-Lucky
Watch on SBS on Demand
Happy-Go-Lucky is a change of pace for the maestro of misery, Mike Leigh, who has made a career out of hollowing us out with his bleak portraits of working class despair. Sally Hawkins is irresistible as Poppy, a bubbly North London schoolteacher who has just turned 30. Poppy seems incapable of getting angry, and goes through life with a relentless, infectious optimism that tends to rub people the wrong way. As is the way with many Leigh films, not much actually happens — it’s a lot of milling about with deeply interesting, recognisably human characters. Though unlike David Thewlis’s succubus bully in Naked, you’ll be sad to see Poppy go. We watch her navigate little life tribulations — driving lessons with a pervy, racist, ill-tempered instructor; a bullying incident in the schoolyard. And enjoy her company as she takes up flamenco lessons, and sinks pints at the pub with her equally delightful friends.
Scott Walker: 30th Century Man
Watch on Mubi
Scott Walker lived many lives. His outré, far-reaching career started as a teen heart-throb in the 1960s with the pop-trio The Walker Brothers, but he had a taste for the darker, nastier stuff. This fascinating film is a study of an artist who turned his back on fame, and moved on from ‘60s moptopper to influential, avant-garde composer and uncompromising purveyor of experimental pop. From using his exquisite baritone (which David Bowie, the film’s executive producer, said “could topple over into Broadway”) to his haunting, late-career collaboration with cult experimental drone metal band Sunn O))) about the moral quagmires of assisted suicide. The documentary features interviews with the likes of Bowie, Brian Eno, Radiohead, Sting, and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, and a rare glimpse into his control freak creative process on his masterwork album The Drift. If you weren’t already a Walker fan going in, prepare to have a new favourite artist.
Uncle
Watch on Stan
Nick Helm’s comedy is very shouty and sweary, and his one-liners are best reserved for the locker room — so if that’s not your cup of Rosy, you’ll be tempted to shut this off within minutes. If you do stick with this series, it may surprise you. This heartwarming buddy comedy follows Andy (Helm), a pathetic, out-of-work musician who hasn’t made it and probably never will — the kind who blames the world for not understanding his genius and bemoans the state of popular music. When we meet him, he’s just been dumped and is penning a suicide note in his scuzzy, bong-strewn gaff. Andy is saved from taking a bath with a toaster by a phone call from his sister, an ex-addict in the middle of a custody battle, asking if he can pick her son up from school. The nephew, Errol (played excellently by Elliot Speller-Gillot, who is neither annoying nor cutesy), is a bright, emotionally mature kid with OCD tendencies and, pivotal to the story, a real knack for making music.
