The first time I watched Too muchLena Dunham’s return to television scripted after an interruption of seven years, she seemed incredibly disappointing-visually flat, almost faithful to a faith, more worthy of distribution in her dependence on the clashes of Anglo-American culture for the charm that Mary-Kate and Ashley trying to make a royal goalkeeper smile. The premise: Jess (played by Hacks“Megan Stalter) is a New Yorker working in advertising production which offered the possibility of moving to London when its relationship implodes catastrophically. (Dunham, like never daring to try to try to love his characters, A Jess, in the first episode, performing in his ex’s apartment and terrorizing his new influencer girlfriend while brandishing a garden gnome.) Arrival in London, Jess has a fortuitous meeting with Felix (Will Sharpe), a patent musician, in a CUB particularly vile. The two are unhappy in a different but complementary way – Jess tells Felix how to wash her hands, Felix helps Jess to go home when she accidentally orders her uber in Heathrow.
These are difficult moments to be romantic, especially on Netflix. Two years ago, on a New York Podcast deploring the modern state of the Rom-Com, Alexandra Schwartz noted that the most crucial quality for any romance is: “You must believe that these two people want to be together, and you have to buy.” On this front, Too much Barely try even. Stalter is stringent eccentric as Jess, and Sharpe adds a coverage complexity with Felix’s casual charm. But as a screen amateurs, the pair has an almost negative chemistry, gathering with an upturn of shoulders and remaining together of what looks like inertia. Initially, this put my teeth on the edge – two characters with apparently little interest in the others have joined the chaotic insistence of a child who makes his soft toys. But the more I come back to the show, the more his loose and not very romantic approach to love seems intentional. Jess and Felix are not because they are stunned feelingDrunk with proximity and intimacy and connection, but because everyone offers something specific the other that needs. Too much is co-produced by the working title, and the names of his episodes have a sign of heads to sticky roma-comes served by society at the time: Four weddings and funerals,, Notting hill. But where the heart of the show should be is rather pure pragmatism: it is love for a cold climate.
If you compare Too much With the recent film of Celine Song, MaterialistsIn which each character extends the romantic perspectives with the agenda of a job manager, you can feel a theme. Can we allow ourselves to really fall in love NOW? In this economy? Dunham presents the craze as absurd, or even destructive: the best episode of Too much is the one who details the breakdown of Jess’s seven -year relationship with Zev (Michael Zegen), a budding music writer who appears as a white knight in a night bar where she lost her friends and her pizza (nobly, he secures another tranche) and immediately dazzles Jess in the submission, charming his family, disappointing the sculpted kisses rits, Massager its grand-child-child. Quickly, however, he smiles. When she moves with him, he is indignant by the fact that a large part of his belongings is pink. He sneers on his love for the walks of Power Miley Cyrus and laughs at his need for affection. “I swear you dress in kiss For people sometimes, Jess, ”he said, when she puts a sailor’s smock to go out. The longer she loves her, the more contempt he becomes.
Felix, on the other hand, is cool from the start. No one is better than Dunham to write sympathetic fucking, men at different stages of stopped development which are unpleasantly uniquely attractive. At the pub, Felix treats Jess as a kind of curiosity (she wears, in fact, the same Smock of sailor that we later learn that Zev had been so cruel). It is only when he sees the comfort of the Jess rental apartment that something seems to click in his mind in an attractive way, like a modern Elizabeth Bennet reconsidering his feelings for Mr. Darcy after his first visit to Pemberley. Jess, a little random, try to kiss Felix; Felix, disturbed, admits that he has a girlfriend and leaves. He walks a little by listening to Fiona Apple and smoking, then returns to Jess, where he finds her watered in the shower by a paramedical ambulancer in the baby’s face after accidentally set fire to his nightgown. A little incredibly, it remains.
Too much Gestures in the Rom-Com, but he seems more in love with sitcom, in particular the low, pissed off and slightly maniac mode of British comedies on BBC Three: Scourge,, Draw,, Coupling. Compared to Dunham Girlswhose management and cinematography have specifically resulting Woody Allen and Mike Mills is a strangely unpretentious program, the genre that is more generally cheap on the dimensions of the British viewer. In an episode of bottle at the beginning, Jess and Felix remain standing overnight in his apartment, having sex, eating philos and ignoring the emotional signals of the other. (He tells her to be disgusted by an ex when he saw her eat a cold Chinese cuisine with a look of virgin despair; later, in secret, Jess shoves cold noodles in his mouth with the same vacancy.) The characters do antic, without inflating things that require little explanation and often challenge logic. Felix will claim unemployment, saying to the officer to assess him that if he gets a job, he will not have time to write music. Jess is going to search with a director of Hotshot, has almost sex with him in a four -post bed in Firelit, then appears outside the Felix window, begging him to move with her. At the end of the series, Jennifer Saunders appears to play a character identical to Absolutely fabulousis Edina, up to the self-partner style and on vocal delivery.
But with the help of flashback episodes, the show also begins to explain why Felix and Jess could be attracted to each other. Jess, always devastated from her breakup and without friends in London, finds instant stability in Felix as a person who takes care of her, even if, at least sublimated, she seems to see through him. Like so many heroines of Dunham, Jess is a perplexed mixture of intuition and illusion; She offers Felix a joint bank account after being barely a week together, but also correctly identifies that her total lack of ambition corresponds awkwardly with her pride in her work. If, as an actor, Stalter sometimes seems less convincing than Dunham to remove the combination, it is because it is an extremely difficult register to play. By walking towards a guest at a wedding, Jess introduces himself by saying: “Wearing neutrals is like a way to say that you have abandoned, right?” – A line so brutal that Hannah Horvath could Blanch. Felix, whose childhood turns out to be non-loving and unstable, seems to see in Jess something like an instant security: not just a warm person with a house that is much more welcoming than his chaotic squat full of eco-warriors, but an insta family. If their relationship skips the exhilarating and obsessive crushing phase to enter directly into a comfortable, solid domestic mode and, it may be because that is what the two really aspire.
Initially, something on Too muchThe insistence is to quote rom-comes in its episode titles while resisting the romance so obstinately seeming to me. The quality that attracts us, say, the tortured dynamic of Connell and Marianne on Normal people or the unbreakable link between Nora and Hae sung Past is the idea that love is in a way transcendent, that it raises humans above the level of simple existence. But realistically, what is love if not care and attention? And what are care and attention if not expressions of tenderness and respect? Dunham buries clues throughout Too much It seems to suggest what she thinks of men and women: marriage, Felix’s father said to his wife late in the show, comes from Latin words manemeaning “mother” and a lotThis means “activity” – it is a question of preparing a girl to be a mother, and in many ways, a maternal dynamic is exactly what Felix and Jess want. “You are like this extraterrestrial,” said Jess in the last episode, “but you also feel at home.”
