Phillip Barantini’s four-episode British TV series Adolescence is as powerful and compelling a work as the medium has ever produced. I doubt a better work of film or theatre has emerged this decade.
It opens with a 13-year-old Jamie arrested and charged with murdering a girl from his school. He pleads innocent.
Apart from the brilliantly realistic dialogue and uniformly masterful casting and performance, each episode is filmed — in one continuous shot!
This was a huge challenge. Imagine having the props, lighting, background, performances, camera movement, all set so firmly that a single take catches and freezes all. That took work.
Of course that laborious technique has a point. The unbroken continuity of each episode embodies the central theme — not fully articulated until the end of the fourth. That is, the uninterrupted continuity of a debilitating “masculinity” from the violent grandfather, to Jamie’s father— who vows not to repeat his father’s cruelty, but still manages to stultify his son with his oppressive expectations. Then Jamie himself is ultimately victim of his inherited temper and inability to accept himself.
As the parents finally realize, they made their son and their daughter. The masculinity accounts for their different being.
In that light, the drama could as well be titled Adolescents. For all three generations of men have been unable to survive the demands and pressures of “manliness” placed on them. All are weakened — indeed, incapacitated —by their requisite, ostensible “strength.”
That also includes the cop who attends the psychiatrist’s interview in Episode 3. He hates his job/role and wishes he could switch with her, not just in profession but in feminine sensitivity. For her part, the therapist articulates the “manhood” paradox and embodies the burden of women’s roles in these men’s lives, extending into Jamie’s mother, sister — and victim.
That includes the cop Bascombe in Episode Two, whose detached relationship with his own troubled son is a replay of the central drama. His prominent role in the first two episodes segues into Jamie’s father as the at first implicit, then clear focus of the last two episodes.
In the last, in a lengthy car conversation Jamie’s parents — to their daughter’s embarrassment — recall their adolescence, the school dance where the boy broke loose, fell calamitously but won the girl’s first kiss. That romance began with the boy's embrace of vulnerability -- lost in his adulthood.
Then there’s the music. Very little, if any, within the drama. But the songs that crop up carry thematic weight. Aurora’s closing lyric, “Through the Eyes of a Child,” extends the theme and emotional power of Jamie’s father’s realization. After four hours (i.e.,about a year?) he finally breaks down in open tears, as he puts Jamie’s teddy to bed, in his son’s place, and finally admits the softness he has wasted his life in suppressing. Manhood.
This level of continuity has two film precedents — both a pale breeze in comparison. One was a Russian meander through their famous Hermitage art gallery.
Before that — and more pertinently -- came Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). In Patrick Hamilton’s source play a philosophy prof is stunned to find that two students acted on his theoretical argument for eliminating the weak. They lived out his theory that the superior may transcend the law. When he learns his word became a murderous deed he was astonished — and morally implicated — by that continuity. The continuity of the titular rope was embodied in Hitchcock shooting the entire film in the 10-minute stretch of the film reel, finding ways to cover the technical breaks.
Shooting in 10-minute units was a challenge in 1948. Even with all our tech advances, though, the up-to-60-minute flow of each episode-long shot here is astonishing.
And yet… and yet… that technical achievement pales before the achievement of the script and performance. This work is genius.
