Suranne is superb at falling apart. But, oh my nerves...
Channel 4, Thursday Cooking With Paris Netflix
IAm Victoria starred Suranne Jones as a woman who is mentally unravelling, and it’s a TV drama that is hard to recommend because it’s so painful and stressful – I could barely watch at times – but also hard not to recommend as it’s so good about what it’s like to be in that kind of pain and unravel in that way. So I can’t recommend it, but also very much can, and now that’s clear, we can move on.
This is the second series of I Am…, Dominic Savage’s highly acclaimed female-led anthology in which he collaborates with actors on stories that have personal resonance. Jones has said she went to him with the idea based on her own ‘little breakdown’ and her experiences around anxiety and struggling to keep it all together.
Victoria is struggling to keep it all together but doesn’t yet know it. She is in thrall to perfectionism, which is a noble aspiration but also a cruel one. (I tried it once but gave up when I realised it probably meant cushions piled just so on the bed.) Her house is minimalist and immaculately white. She is endlessly wiping down the kitchen worktops. The cushions on the bed must be just so. Always. She gets up early in the morning so she can exercise, have a quick panic attack in the shower, as you do, and dress sharply before her husband (Ashley Walters) and two young daughters are awake.
She is determined to enforce a scenario of happiness and even practises happiness before the mirror – a smile, her happy face! – yet throughout her, madness burns. You can feel the heat of it. Her husband, who is fantastically understanding, feels the heat of it too. He suggests she needs help but she won’t have it. She just wants the kids to wear proper clothes and not sloppy leggings.
There is no real plot as such, and no backstory and no flashbacks, praise be. (Is Professor T still flashing back like mad over on ITV?) An outsider turns up in the form of Victoria’s needy, angry sister and it all builds towards a dinner party, by which time I’d gnawed my knuckles to the bone and had paused several times as it was that nerve-racking. Tension was pulled so tight you knew it had to snap but you didn’t know how – oh God, the stress – while Jones was entirely astonishing.
This was all filmed with a handheld camera that rarely left her face. It was intimate, claustrophobic, and Jones’s skittery, intense performance made you feel every ounce of Victoria’s panic. I feared the ending might say: women, you can’t have it all. But that wasn’t it. It said: it’s OK to fall apart. It may be for the best. And it was hopeful, ultimately, even if someone did use the word ‘journey’ in a therapeutic sense, which always makes me want to run from the room. So I’d recommend it, and also wouldn’t. Depends on where you stand when it comes to being put through the wringer, really.
I recently read that Paris Hilton was due a reappraisal, like Britney Spears, but Cooking With Paris truly does her no favours. Hilton has always claimed not to be the person we see on TV, but I wish she’d give us something to work with. I’m not saying she has to be up to speed on, say, the situation of Tamils in Indonesia, but just a spark of something, anything, would be excellent.
Here the heiress/model/actress/singer/ businesswoman/reality star is her usual tiresome self, and seems as bored with that persona – if it is a persona – as we are. Hilton says at the outset that she can cook but isn’t a trained chef, although it quickly becomes apparent that she can’t cook at all. For each of the six episodes, she prepares a meal alongside a co-celebrity. The first to truck up is Kim Kardashian. ‘Your hair is gorgeous,’ says Kim on her arrival. ‘Than-kew,’ says Paris, and the conversation never becomes any deeper than that. (‘That’s so cute, Paris.’ ‘Than-kew…’)
Kim seems slightly ahead in terms of knowing what to do in the kitchen but still can’t tell the difference between a mixer and blender. Paris, whose tastes appear to have been arrested in childhood (‘My favourite food group is cereal’), has never heard of ‘tongs’ – ‘I call them the picky-uppy things’ – and asks at one point: ‘Why does this keep turning brown?’ ‘Because it’s cooking,’ Kim tells her. We are meant to be tickled. We are meant to laugh at her – she is dispatched to the supermarket wearing ridiculous couture – while feeling better about ourselves. She may be uber-privileged but she has to ask: ‘What are chives?’
However, she takes no real interest in any of this at all. She shows no excitement, no enthusiasm, no curiosity, nothing. ‘That’s amazing,’ she often said, in the deadest voice ever, and with a dead look in her eyes. She’s bored, we’re bored, and I can’t speak for Kim Kardashian but she looked pretty bored too.