Stateless makes its point crisply
Aussie import is must viewing in today’s world
Stateless
Streaming, Netflix
LOS A N G E L E S Netflix’s new drama Stateless gets to its subject only circuitously. We meet Sofie (Yvonne Strahovski) as she’s running through the Australian desert trying to escape from something, then zoom back in time to see her as a polished flight attendant whose attempts at escape are somewhat less literal.
Sofie, before her life takes a strange turn, is a devotee of a dance-based cult led by Cate Blanchett (a series co-creator) and Dominic West, both operating at the height of their charisma. When Sofie is turned away from the cult after having torched her family life and career, she ends up in immigration detention even despite being an Australian citizen. (This series first aired on Australian TV and is inspired in part by the story of a woman unlawfully detained in Australia in 2004.)
There’s a touch of Orange Is the New Black here: Strahovski’s seemingly out-of-place blond opens up the story for a subset of the audience less inclined to see her fellow prisoners as real people with struggles, as Taylor Schilling’s character did on her dramedy. And over time, Strahovski, like Schilling, comes both to become less of the story’s main event and less the object of our sympathy, as we see just how easy it is for people every bit as brave as she but not white women to get ensnared in hell. The Trojan-horse effect is real, though, as the presence of Blanchett and West as the figures drawing Sofie into her hell will be as much an inducement as anything for new viewers. Blanchett here is all sinuous charisma, while West is a coiled threat in human form.
At the camp, though, Strahovski shares screen time with a family of Afghan refugees led by a tough administrator played by Asher Keddie; and a newbie guard played by Jai Courtney. The guard character pulls off a difficult writerly trick of breaking down under the pressures of acting as a cog in the prison state without ending up making the story about a guard’s guilt. Fayssal Bazzi’s family’s story thrums in the backbeat of the story, keeping our eye on the class of person (non-white, bereft of any social advantage) that Stateless is about.
Which is not to say the story’s time with Sofie is misspent. The series, directed by Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse has a keen eye on how Sofie seizes what little advantages she can — seeing them as her birthright.
The fear of our fellow humans, so strong that we build fortresses to keep them out, is as much the behaviour of a cult as anything those two charismatic weirdos practise, and every bit as destructive. It’s just that West and Blanchett are at society’s fringes, while anti-immigrant sentiment is at the centre of societies the world over. It’s a point Stateless makes crisply, one that gains in power from the hairpin-reversing manner through which the series arrives there, and one that makes it urgent viewing.