Why Little Birds is the sexy escapism we need this summer
IT IS 1955 and dinnertime at the house of the Savages (name: not an accident). The family represent a splendidly clad New York elite to whom success, good taste and wealth are automatic. Daughter Lucy ( Juno Temple) is handed a gift by her father before entrées are served. She is about to flee the luxurious family nest on a cruise to Tangiers to marry her fiancée, an easily flustered and, quite frankly, gay English gentleman called Hugo (Hugh Skinner, Fleabag’s original boyf ). She unpicks the bow from the package to find a ladylike pistol, fashioned with a pearlescent handle, inscribed ‘love, daddy’. There may be trouble ahead.
Lucy Savage is the blossoming cornerstone of a new and, astonishingly, first adaptation of Anaïs Nin’s Little Birds, a short story collection so frank in its exploration of female sexuality, it didn’t make it to print until two years after the writer’s death in 1977. It looks beautiful, feels cleverly in thrall to Nin’s peerless reputation for visiting map points of the erotic psyche others daren’t and acts as a timely reminder that complicated sexuality was not invented by Normal People and I May Destroy You. Amid the well-tailored set pieces, there is a sex scene culminating in urination at a North African bordello within 10 minutes of screen time beginning.
The characters circumnavigating Lucy’s first footsteps into an eye-popping world are introduced in a vaudevillian roll call across the first episode. The bawdy madam who looks a bit like Lady Gaga’s mum, Hugo’s bronzed, spurned lover, a nightclub performer with a Wildean quip for every occasion, and a beautiful political zealot who lovingly frames the socio-political backdrop of the French colonisation of Morocco.
It’s a strong set-up, rippling with period detail and an excellent eye for when to detonate a chaotic moment of the script. You’ll be unlikely to forget the bawdy closing rendition of Les Marseillaises in a hurry. Lucy’s startling voyage of sexual discovery is handled considerately, finding its own tempo within Temple’s occasionally mannered reading of her clipped lust for life. Like Nin’s writing, there is still a fearlessness to the composition of the show, even now. Within the darkness, Lucy is about to happen upon some genuinely liberating enlightenment.
From 4 August, 9pm, Sky Atlantic