Metropolitan Mixtape: April '24
An Italian getaway, a Surrey summerhouse & this month's playlist
In
1 Ripley (8-part series, Netflix, 2024)
The Editors positively inhaled the new Netflix adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley. It’s not particularly faithful to the book, not least because Andrew Scott is double the age that Tom Ripley is supposed to be at this point in the cycle. But it is its own, splendid thing.
Scott is great, as is Dakota Fanning, but Italy is the winner. The weakest bit is Eliot Sumner, who has inherited all their father’s acting ability. Steven Zaillian’s direction is incredibly mannered and present and perfectly persuasive, a little like Ripley himself. Most of all it is monochrome and slow, both of which have proved divisive.
Perhaps The Metropolitan is getting old, but we loved it. It felt like sitting at a cafe table on a Mediterranean holiday, watching the world go slowly by, hearing snatches of conversations and distant music. It induces a watchfulness that is both languorous and tense: you don’t know who any of these people are, what the local customs might be, or really – in any true sense – where you are. But the scenery is so good, and the tableaux so intriguing, that you don’t want to move.
The music’s great too.
The menu at this steak-based restaurant chain is admirably concise, featuring just one steak and a couple of other mains. We don’t like medium-rare steak (which is the only kind you can have at Flatiron), so we were delighted to discover that their burgers are two thin, stacked McDonalds-like burgers covered in excellent American cheese, rather than the more customary spongy hockey pucks oozing gore.
3 Super-Infinite (book, Katherine Rundell, 2022)
A wonderfully luminous biography of John Donne by Rundell, who before this had mostly written children’s books. (Rundell’s own biography is of the kind to make you spit; she’s in her early 30s, and as well as being a wildly successful writer in a number of genres she’s also a Fellow of All Souls.) Rundell’s style is gorgeous; funny, fluid, punchy and clever, with a register that’s very close to Hilary Mantel’s. You don’t have to know anything about Donne to enjoy this.
Side-mission: this walk along the Wey Navigation Canal in Pyrford, Surrey goes past an antique summerhouse attached to Pyrford Place. It was here that Donne and Anne More, his new wife, took refuge while the bride’s father fulminated at their secret marriage. Living in a beautiful but isolated two-storey cottage overlooking the water, forced into close proximity for months on end, one can only imagine that these two incredibly hot young newly-weds must have had an absolutely dreadful time. As Donne wrote when he was there:
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Poor things.
We done Dune 2, or at least two of us did. We also recently watched Denis Villeneuve’s war-on-drugs thriller Sicario. At root Sicario is a pretty standard revenge thriller, but it evades thick-eared-ness by concentrating on Emily Blunt’s FBI agent, who doesn’t understand what’s going on around her. This has the effect of deliciously misdirecting the viewer away from the central plot.
Villeneuve’s direction turns Sicario into a meditation on alienation, both in the landscape of the American South West and in the US’s policies on illegal drugs. He does much the same with Dune, the difference being that buried in Frank Herbert’s dense sci-fi silliness is an examination of heroism and extremism, marrying some interesting subject matter to Villeneuve’s visuals.
They’ve done a splendid job of adapting to the screen; all the changes from the book are sensible and work well. The design, though excellent, is a little too precise, and it’s getting a little dull to have the baddies being the BDSM planet of goths. Basically, we missed Sumner senior’s rubber pants, Patrick Stewart’s battle pug and the gloriously alien feel of David Lynch’s version; but of course we did.
Another humdrum thriller elevated by excellent direction is Peter Weir's Witness, which we rewatched on a whim. Harrison Ford looks a little lost without a whip or a spaceship, and Kelly McGillis isn’t given a great deal to do. Child actor Lukas Haas is unusually charming and watchable. But it’s Peter Weir’s slow landscapes and beautifully composed frames that make it memorable. The middle section focusing on Amish life is restful and contemplative, and anyone who’s ever seen it remembers the barn-raising sequence. Extra points for spotting an early film appearance by Viggo Mortensen in the background.
Out
1 Baby Reindeer (7-part series, Netflix, 2024)
We rather bounced off this Richard Gadd vehicle, an adaptation of his Edinburgh show about being stalked by an older woman. Tobias found it just too tense to enjoy properly, while not being quite captivating enough to make him power through the discomfort. Rowan found the high-Millennial tone slightly irksome, and – although she can sometimes persevere through that – Tobias’s squirming and twitching led inexorably towards the ‘Home’ button. We didn’t get past the second episode, although internet commentary insistently suggests that we are mistaken.
2 Blue Lights (series 1, BBC, 2023)
We have a particular problem in this house with TV series that everyone describes as ‘brilliant’ but turn out to be just ‘not actually terrible’. All the other programmes these people are watching must be astonishingly bad. This Northern Ireland-set police series is a case in point: it’s not awful, but it sure ain’t no Line of Duty or Endeavour (ie, well-written, tightly plotted middlebrow police schlock with good character actors). It’s just a soap, and not the good kind. If you want a compelling exploration of how paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland intersects with British state bodies, we highly recommend the 2014 thriller ‘71.
Shake It All About
After our inadvertent spoiler last week (when we accidentally sent out a test draft of this feature) here is our playlist for this month. These will mostly be tracks that are new to us, at least, but it’ll include old favourites and seasonal picks too. It's basically what Tobias has been listening to for the last few weeks. The playlists will all be on Spotify.
Tony Renis’s version of ‘Quando, Quando, Quando’ has been on repeat ever since we watched Ripley. A little bit of Italian romance in the rainy English suburbs.
A splendid, dreamy shoegaze cover of Blondie’s ‘Dreaming’ by Korean band Say Sue Me. Like it's 1989 all over again.
Tarta Relena are a Catalan duo who sing close harmony versions of Mediterranean folk songs with spooky electronic accompaniment. What I imagine the Fremen of Dune frugging to in their subterranean deep desert night clubs.
Right, out of the caves and onto the dancefloor. It's spring, after all, an appropriate time to strut one’s stuff, if you can remember where you put it when you packed it away for winter.
While Wilmoth Houdini thinks Frank Sinatra would be great at singing Calypso, he advises him not to try the accent, which suggests he’d heard Robert Mitchum’s cringeworthy attempts.
I know nothing about this track other than its a nice chugging, laid back little bit of folky hip-hop. Perfect for a little walk, if the rain stops.
A woozy, dreamy song. Maybe we stopped in at the pub on our walk and things have got a little hazy.
The Metropolitan Canine Correspondent, AKA the furry idiot, is coming to stay soon.
This purports to be from 2020, but sounds more like the mid-’70s, which is fine with me.
Finally a spritely, ticking, upbeat track from Ivorian singer Peter One. It's still jacket weather, but it's starting to get warm when the sun breaks through. The bird is on the wing, the snail on the thorn, Spring has lit the green fuse and retired to a safe distance. Hard not to feel a little cheery at the prospect.
It’s podcast week! Since we’ve been writing a lot about comedy this month, here’s Chris Waywell reading his essay on Tony Hancock and Philip Guston, ‘Ooh, you poor man’.
Great, now I've caught the Quando, Quando, Quando earworm. Thanks a lot!
The true star of Ripley is the watchful elevator cat