Erotic, funny and oh-so raw, Fleabag is shockingly watchable
FLEABAG divides opinion like few other television dramas. Can we even decide if it is a tragedy or a comedy? Like life itself, perhaps the BBC show is a double helping of both, with a dollop of proper sauce on top.
In this week’s episode Fleabag’s ongoing crush with an attractive Catholic priest — played by Andrew Scott like an intense, jerky puppet — led to whisky-laced, sexually charged scenes in the confessional box.
It led to a flurry of comments online, with women saying it was the sexiest thing they’d seen on television in years: ‘God it was erotic!’ gasped one. ‘Closest I’ve ever got to Christianity,’ wrote another.
It was a typically Fleabag moment; somehow managing to be erotic, funny and desperately sad, all at the same time.
Much of this is down to the emotional precision of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s writing, plus her winning, quicksilver performance in the central role.
On the surface Fleabag — we never learn her real name — is a swashbuckling adventuress; a woman of the world who is quick of wit, scarlet of lip, sexually confident and able to wear a plunge front jumpsuit with aplomb. Yet inside she is often a jelly of insecurities, worn down and worried by the choices she has made.
‘I am ashamed of not knowing what I want,’ she sobs in the confession box, wishing for a saviour to tell her what to wear, what to rage about, what to buy tickets for and ‘how to live my life’. MAnY
young women — exhausted by the daily stress of modern existence, the endless decision-making and constant social pressures to be tough, smart and on top of myriad political and gender issues at all times — will recognise and empathise with her pain.
As she says in the first series; ‘I have a horrible feeling that I am a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.’ Well, we’ve all been there.
Fleabag worries how to be, and also how to be enough.
In this, she is more broken and damaged than other popular confessional singleton characters, such as Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaw and the unspeakable Miranda.
However, she has a jauntiness and a sly intelligence that hint at her ultimate triumph and survival. Let’s hope so!
With her frequent asides to camera, she is the ring mistress in her family circus of grotesques: Bill Paterson as her remote father; Olivia Colman as her hated godmother and soonto-be stepmother; Sian Clifford as her uptight sister; and Brett Gelman as her ghastly and predatory brother-in-law.
All of them turning in quietly brilliant performances within each bevelled, 30-minute episode.
In many ways, Fleabag is the unlikeliest of contemporary heroines — posh, clever and carelessly elegant, with something of the 1930s about her.
By day, she is the proprietress of a ridiculously twee guinea pig cafe; by night, she is a sexual buccaneer whose adventures are often fraught.
In a winning cameo this week, Kristin Scott Thomas played a sophisticated gay businesswoman who turns down Fleabag’s advances, while the sexy priest seems equally determined to evade her clutches.
‘Is this a skirt and trousers?’ she shrieks, in a moment of wanton attempted defrocking before he comes to his senses. Actually, there is far less sex in this series, thank goodness.
Although there are few actual sex scenes, critics of Fleabag objected to the louche morals of the first series.
A particular issue was the way she would use men as casual sexual diversions, then talk graphically afterwards about what they did together.
Yet slowly we came to understand that Fleabag’s behaviour is motivated not by her naughtiness, but by her grief.
First of all, her mother died three years ago. ‘She had a double mastectomy but never really recovered,’ Fleabag informed us. At the funeral her father failed to give her the emotional support she needed. ‘Buck up. Smile. Charm. Off we go. We’ll be OK,’ he told her, as she sobbed.
Even worse is that fact that best friend Boo (Jenny Rainsford) died in the first series and Fleabag feels guilt and moral responsibility over her death.
Though Fleabag now seems to be in a better emotional place — the cafe is doing well, for a start — the show’s comedy action is still spiked with flashbacks to poor doomed Boo.
In Fleabag, there is much to laugh at, but faces are often streaked with tears, noses are bloodied and dreams are crushed.
Yet on and on our girl rallies, her amused, vulnerable glances to camera inviting us to marvel at the glorious mess of her life.