The four-part TV streamer, which is one of the most watched things ever produced by Netflix, presents the situation of a 13-year-old boy who is accused of killing a girl with a knife and her girlfriends admit to the dire range of internet injunctions and dangerously deadly things she came out with. And all of this has associated with the bizarre masculinist credo of Andrew Tate and his cult of young women enjoying violence, rape and all. This last is a bit of a red herring, though a ghastly and compelling one.
Adolescence has stirred the interest of some of the mightier counsels in the world: on the one hand, Elon Musk thinks it’s prejudice that the accused boy should be white rather than black, while Keir Starmer thinks Adolescence should be compulsory viewing in schools. And, on top of that, we have had a world of very personal mother and son opinion pieces in which women tell the story of what it was like to watch this terrifying representation of the confusions of being young in a dangerous, sexually obsessive world of teens who speak primarily through the curse-laden argot of the internet and the body-laden battlefield of Instagram and its potential to be a dance of death.
This is one overwhelming anxiety-creating aspect of Adolescence as a kind of political event. But, rising above it in some sense is the fact that this four-parter, which almost compels the viewer to watch it in something like a single sitting, is, at its best, staggeringly powerful simply – is it ever simply? – as art. The script is by Jack Thorne, the producers include Stephen Graham, (who plays the father) and Brad Pitt. And overriding everything else, there is Owen Cooper as the boy Jamie who gives one of the greater performances anyone will see, in any medium, in their lifetime.
Adolescence is also a thing of wonder for its extraordinary single take style of great power and breathtaking fluency which the cinematographer Matthew Lewis uses to create an effect of absolute urgency conveyed through extreme compositional gradation. In fact, the upshot was the result of multiple run-throughs – sometimes as many as 10 – to get a sense of the barest, most improvisational sense of reality in a way that recalls masters of the cinema such as Max Ophüls of whom Todd Haynes said that his camera could go through walls.
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