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episodes of season one seemed a caricature of a pre-GFC City - one fuelled by foul language and drugs but long-since superseded by a risk-off, highly regulated reality.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.

BACK TO BLACK****

Marisa Abella (Industry) delivers a stunning central performance as Amy Winehouse in this new biopic of the singer. She captures Amy's caustic wit, her physical mannerisms, and most impressively, her spoken and singing voice.  Director Sam Taylor-Wood (NOWHERE BOY) tackles the audience's apprehension head on in an opening scene showing Winehouse's Jewish parental family singing together. Abela freestyles Fly Me To The Moon and the audience relaxes, safe in the knowledge that Abela's Amy is spot on. Her Amy is straightforward to the point of rudeness, full of energy and sheer talent. But also troubled way before she meets her much vilified husband Blake Fielder-Civil. She is already bulimic and alcohol dependent with a self-acknowledged streak of self-sabotage, particularly when it comes to men. This is something that Matt Greenhalgh's script, using her own lyrics, explores from the first scenes.

About forty minutes into the film, Amy's first album has been a breakout success but she has been told to restyle herself for America. This plays into all of the insecurities that have fed into her self-abuse. And at that moment we meet Jack O'Connell (UNBROKEN) as Blake Fielder-Civil. He is charming and fun and has a deep knowledge of music over which he and Amy can bond. It's another powerhouse performance. There's an immediate spark and we are swept up in young, heedless romance.  According to this version of the story, it was a genuine love affair on both sides at first, and while he was already using Class A drugs she stuck "only" to alcohol and weed. It's only when they reunite after a break-up that he was motivated more by her fame and money and ability to fund his smack habit.  Once inside prison, he cleans up and realises what's obvious to the rest of us - that this is a desperately toxic codependent relationship with competitive self-harm. He wants to break free. Fair enough. But it breaks Amy in the process.

Needless to say, this is a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of Fielder-Civil than we got from contemporary news reports, or from Asif Kapadia's superb 2015 documentary AMY. My only criticism of Kapadia is that he often creates pantomime villains in his films - whether Alain Prost in SENNA or Fielder-Civil and Mitch Winehouse in AMY.  Greenhalgh and Taylor-Wood may have swung the pendulum back too far in BACK TO BLACK but I really appreciate the attempt to treat humans as flawed real people. And we have to remember that Fielder-Civil was also a young man and an addict at the time. 

The whitewashing of Mitch Winehouse, played by the innately sympathetic Eddie Marsan, is probably going to be even more controversial.  In this film, he is portrayed as an indulgent father who is totally out of his depth when it comes to Amy's addictions. This kind of tracks with Amy's mother saying, in Kapadia's documentary, that when Amy told them about her bulimia they just kind of ignored it and hoped it would pass. We don't see the avaricious exploitative father of Kapadia's doc at all.

But let's not be fooled into thinking this film is a whitewashing of the brutality of addiction and bulimia.  Amy's descent into full blown class A drug addiction is shown explicitly, but never exploitatively. We see her ability to go clean for periods, but that she is, in the scripts words, always on edge, so that it doesn't take much to push her over. In this film, it's always heartbreak that does it - whether Fielder-Civil leaving her, or her inability to get pregnant and have the stable family life she craved.  The narrative is convincing, and Abela's central performance is heartbreaking.  I love that we spent so much time with Amy and her beloved Nan (Leslie Manville) and saw that Amy's heart was rooted in jazz. I felt I had an understanding of her deep familial musical heritage that I didn't get from Kapadia's doc.  And this is, I think, one of the most important things that we need to know about her.

BACK TO BLACK is rated R and has a running time of 122 minutes. It went on release in the UK today and goes on release in the USA on May 17th.