Stateless makes its point crisply
Aussie import is must viewing in today’s world
Stateless Streaming, Netflix
LOS ANGELES 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 (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.)
Over time, Strahovski becomes less of the story’s main event and less the object of our sympathy, as we see just how easy it is for people to get ensnared in hell. The Trojan-horse effect is real, though, with Blanchett and West as the figures drawing Sofie into her hell. 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 making the story about a guard’s guilt.
Fayssal Bazzi’s family’s story
thrums in the backbeat, 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 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 fellow humans, so strong that we build fortresses to keep them out, is as much the behaviour of a cult as anything the two charismatic weirdos practise, and every bit as destructive. It’s just that Blanchett and West 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.