Your girlfriend, sugar daddy, and his wife walk into a wake...

Oh the joys of a claustrophobic family event filled with unsolicited comments from prying family. Sound familiar? Hell is being a young woman. 

Oh the joys of a claustrophobic family event filled with unsolicited comments from prying family. Sound familiar? Hell is being a young woman. 

Shiva Baby, Binge

Hell is being a young woman. The debut feature from then 25-year-old director Emma Seligman is a full-throttle anxiety spiral. Rachel Sennott (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies) is hysterical as Danielle, an aimless college student making her coin as a secret sugar baby (she’s lying to her parents about having a babysitting gig), in a transactional relationship with an older man (Danny Deferrari). The drama takes place at a day-long shiva, a Jewish wake, to which Danielle is begrudgingly dragged by her overbearing parents. The shiva is claustrophobic; between scarfing down bagels, Danielle is subjected to unsolicited comments from her prying and judgy family friends on everything from her weight (“she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps”), her major, and her sexuality (she’s bisexual). Things only get darker for Danielle, who’s already feeling flustered, when an ex-girlfriend makes an unexpected appearance, as well as her sugar daddy with his wife and new baby.

Titane, Binge

If you’ve got a weak stomach, you’d be wise to steer clear of Julia Ducournau’s (Raw) twisted mechanophilia body horror Titane. The film, which had walkouts and reports of audiences fainting during its Australian premiere at Sydney Film Festival, stars Agatha Rouselle as Alexia, a cutthroat woman with a lifelong fetish for cars. It’s a fixation that stems from surviving a brutal road crash as a child, in which we see a young Alexia emerge from the hospital with a titanium plate in her head, compulsively fondling the family car. Two decades later, Alexia is working at a stripper at car shows — gyrating and grinding on a flame-emblazoned Cadillac. She’s accosted by a creepy fanboy. When he tries it on with her, she brutally murders him with a metal chopstick, setting of a string of increasingly violent and sexual events (including, yes, sex and impregnation with a car). With Titane, Ducournau became only the second woman to win the coveted Cannes Palme d’Or, after Jane Campion took out the prize for The Piano in 1993. 

Drive My Car, World Movies, Sunday at 8.30pm

The real gift of the holiday season is the luxury of getting to watch three-hour movies. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s shorts collection, Men Without Women. The film, which is the first Japanese film to score an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, centres around Yusuku Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a stage actor and director, who, grappling with the death of his wife two years earlier, accepts to direct a multilingual adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanja at a theatre festival in Hiroshima. Kafuku, recently diagnosed with a glaucoma in his left eye, is told by the festival’s organisers that he isn’t allowed to drive his beloved Saab 900 Turbo while living there and a young, introverted woman Misaki Watari (Toko Miuri) has been appointed as his driver. The pair are both wrestling with secrets, and the drives back and forth from work are a slow-burn in bonding and self-revelation, as layers of grief, infidelity, desire, memory and responsibility are delicately peeled back. 

Emily in Paris season 3, Netflix

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Emily In Paris. For the past few years, Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) has allowed us to not think a single thought, to let our brains atrophy, and our bodies go limp, as she carries on the time-honoured “American Girl in Paris” trope. Emily is a millennial junior digital marketing employee, who is sojourned from Chicago to a Paris advertising agency that caters to luxury brands. She is fluent in the digital marketing language none of us understand but nod along to in Zoom meetings (“R.O.I.”, “social impressions”), and is there to “bring an American point of view”. Obviously, the French hate her and her reservoir of bucket hats — but we can’t help but root for earnest Emily. The third season has just arrived on Netflix, Emily is still in Paris, she still can’t speak French, she’s still not very good at her job, and men are still falling over her. 

Matilda The Musical, Netflix

After its hugely popular theatrical run, Matthew Warchus adapts his Matilda stage musician for the big screen. Alisha Weir is bright and bolshie as Roald Dahl’s titular hero, a telekinetic literary wunderkind, who is grossly underappreciated by her dimwit parents, Mr and Mrs Wormwood (in standout performances by Andrea Risenborough and Stephen Graham). She is sent away to an awful school (the motto is “Bambinatum est magitum” — “Children are maggots”) run by the heinous Agatha Trunchbull (Emma Thompson, heaving in prosthetics), who has a penchant for torturing children, and fascist military threads. Matilda finds solace in the protective Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch) and Mrs Phelphs (Sindhu Vee), a travelling bookshop proprietor, who fosters Matilda’s passion for reading and imagination. The songs, written by Australian Tim Minchin, are swashboggling (“very special” in Dahl-ese) and brimming with childhood hope – “revolting children living in revolting time/we sing revolting songs using revolting rhymes/we’ll be revolting children ‘til our revolting’s done”.

See Geordie's other film and TV recommendations

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