INDUSTRY SEASON 3 (TV)***** - warning for spoilers

When I first watched Industry at the BFI London Film Festival I was sceptical. The first episodes of season one seemed a caricature of a pre-GFC City - one fuelled by foul language and drugs but long-since superseded by a risk-off, highly regulated reality.  But as I stuck with the show I realised that while it may be far off the mark of the actual industry it was trying to represent, it was doing something far more interesting and compelling - creating a set of character studies of profound darkness. This reached a fever pitch in season 2 as our psychopathic analyst Harper Stern (Myha'la) was finally cut loose by her boss Eric Tao (Ken Leung) - the anchor relationship of the show thus far was finally broken.  Where would it go in season 3?

The answer is that season 3 focuses on Yas - the spoiled rich girl who can charm anyone and flirts with all, but who has, by her own admission, never actually been in love. The season begins by yanking her solidity in wealth away from her. Her father has been exposed as a sexual predator. He was found dead off his yacht shortly after Yas caught him having sex with an employee in her cabin. The mystery of Yas' role in his death is dangled before us throughout the season.  When faced with paparazzi intrusion and the threat of being held financially liable for her father's debts, Yas shows us that she can be just as narcissistic and immoral and... well... psychopathic as Harper. Maybe that's the writers' point: that the financial industry attracts high-functioning psychopaths.  She is offered the bourgeois stability of a mediocre life with Robert, who has been in love with her from the start. Or she can marry a drug-addict, literally-entitled, incredibly wealthy void of a man. She chooses the latter because he offers her political protection.

And here perhaps a word on season three's highest profile major addition - Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington as Harry Muck.  He features large in the first few episodes and then disappears from view until the epilogue. It's a weird absence.  He plays a tech entrepreneur championing green energy. Pierpoint is handling his IPO and it's a disaster but that's okay because Muck's uncle runs the British media and the government bails him out.  Once again, the writers are making a highly cynical point about the collusion between elites - whether aristocratic, media, political or financial. The season has a highly cynical attitude toward corporate attitudes toward ESG and DEI in general. To wit, Harper Stern. 

Harper, forced out of Pierpoint, is working for a hedge fund that invests in ESG names. She basically betrays that fund manager, forms her own spinoff with Petra (Sarah Goldberg) then betrays Petra who has kind of already betrayed her anyway. She ends up running a predatory short-only hedge fund out of New York investing the money of ruthless British aristos.  I felt that I didn't really learn anything new about Harper this season. Her role was necessarily more limited as the attention shifted to Yas.  Do I care what she does next? Maybe not. Psychopaths will be unvaryingly self-interested and ruthless. I am not sure this holds much dramatic promise.

Of far more interest was Ken Leung's Eric Tao - Harper's former mentor and veteran investment banker. This season Eric is going through a divorce and a mid-life crisis.  As everything he has poured his soul into is burned to the ground we get a stunning final scene in which he confronts a picture of himself as a young analyst - full of promise and naïveté, buying into that capitalist dream.  Poor Eric - well not that poor - he leaves with a 20 million payout - winds down his trading floor as Pierpoint's new middle eastern owners shift trading to London.  Where does the old dinosaur go next. Maybe to New York - as with Harper?

The final major character that we should spend a moment on is Rishi (Sagar Radia - superb), not least because he gets a standalone episode that is one of the highlights of the season. We have come to know him as a foul-mouthed, nasty, bullying trader but one who is effective at his job. In this episode we realise that he is actually a desperate gambling addict, in hock to a loan shark. He has also married a rich white woman whose obnoxious family patronise him. This episode sees his bets get caught in the mayhem of the Liz Truss micro-regime and Rishi pushed to the edge of suicide. It takes the viewer through the ringer. I genuinely thought he wouldn't make it. Maybe the only false note of this season is how it ends for his wife. It felt ludicrous and shocking but maybe that was the point. I will withhold judgment until we see how it plays out next season.

In the newer roles, a shout out to Miriam Petche who plays the ridiculously named Sweetpea Golightly - a new analyst with an Only Fans account - who comes from the post Me Too generation and isn't putting up with any shit. She also has the smarts to figure out Pierpoint is basically bankrupt, much to the credulous laughter of people like Robert who she tries to tell. I was pleased that she got a way out from Pierpoint. Let's hope she keeps her morality and her smarts as the new season unfolds.

INDUSTRY SEASON 3 has just finished airing on HBO and was released on the BBC this week.

BRIMSTONE - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 10

BRIMSTONE is a beautifully photographed and designed western thriller that features Dakota Fanning and Guy Pearce in fiercely committed performances.  However, it falls into the trap of seeking to portray and condemn sexual violence against women by basically showing us a lot of sexual violence against women, in such a manner and style that it almost seems to be enjoying it.  The result is a film that looks beautiful and is certainly fiercely focussed on what it wants to achieve, but which jumps the shark at several key moments, and left me wondering whether it was good with occasional misjudgments, or just plain objectionable.

The film is set in the American midwest in the mid 1800s and focusses on a young mute woman (Dakota Fanning) who is a wife and mother to two small children.  In the first of four chapters we see her incite the vengeance of a mean-spiritied judgmental preacher (Guy Pearce) out of all proportion to her apparent crime of having chosen to save a mother over her baby in a troubled delivery.  But still, in this chapter I was convinced this film was going to be a well-acted, tense, taut thriller. That is until a final act of violence so absurd it pulled me out of the film.  But that was ok, because we then moved into the second chapter, and an apparent re-set of the film, as we met a young runaway girl being picked up by Chinese travellers and sold to a brothel keeper.  This was by far the most interesting and successful segment of the film but once again utterly jumped the shark with violence by the end.  And it was notable that at both of these points in the film, a number of people walked out.  Bu the film got really problematic in its third and fourth segment, where the true nature of the relationship between the preacher and the girl is revealed in all its melodramatic, exploitative detail.

What can I say? If this movie had just exercised a little restraint and thought deeply about how to depict violence against women it might have been a really fascinating, genre-bending movie.  But the director, Martin Koolhoven, seems to have zero instinct about what's provocative and what's just offensive.  It's an enormous shame because Guy Pearce and Dakota Fanning are clearly going for something high quality here, but there's let down by a director with a tin ear. 

BRIMSTONE is rated R and has a running time of 148 minutes.  BRIMSTONE played Venice, London and Toronto 2016. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

Random DVD Round Up - POMPEII

In fairness, we don't look to Paul W S Anderson for films of complexity and artistic daring.  DEATH RACE and RESIDENT EVIL and MORTAL KOMBAT are movies designed for teenage boys that celebrate violence and musclebound men.  No cliche of dialogue is left unused in films of hollow CGI and scarce intelligence.   What's actually amazing is that actors of quality are still willing to star in them. His latest cinematic offering is a sword and sandal epic called POMPEII which borrows heavily from GLADIATOR but has none of its swagger and style.  In fact, its closer to SPARTACUS in terms of cheap CGI, cheesy dialogue and cardboard cut out heroes and villains - but without the soft porn.  GAME OF THRONES' Kit Harrington has packed on the muscle to play the hero - a Celtic gladiator called Milo.  Naturally, he strikes up an unlikely love affair with the aristocratic Cassia (Emily Browning), inspiring the anger of the evil Senator Corvinus (Kiefer Sutherland doing god knows what as an accent/speech impediment.) This leads to a TITANIC style showdown of unsurpassed stupidity and vacuity. I cared not a jot for any of the characters and simply grew more and more irate and how brazenly the cut and paste narrative had stolen plot devices and characters from better films. No matter how much you think you are in love with Jon Snow, you MUST avoid this film at all costs.  And to be frank, as much as I love Kit Harrington in GAME OF THRONES, he this film shows little evidence of any ability to carry of the leading role in a major film.

POMPEII is a POMPEII has a running time of 105 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie was released in spring 2014 and is now available to rent and own.  It goes on release in Turkey on October 31st 2014.