How fragile we are

Illustration/Uday Mohite

It takes a village to raise a child," Stephen Graham said in an interview about his show Adolescence. Two real life murders, in both cases a young man knifing a young girl, occurring in opposite sides of the UK, inspired him to create his show, about a 13-year-old who stabs a fellow female pupil.

For the uninitiated, Adolescence is a four-part series, each episode 60 minutes long, shot in one continuous take. In my recent memory I have never experienced a show, that is so immersive, so incisive, and so invigorating - a show that is never showey. Each episode explores, multi POVs, the protagonist - 13-year-old Jamie - his parents, the police, and the psychologist - uniquely there is no pointing of fingers, though every parent will end up wondering what happens behind the closed doors of their kids bedroom, ruing the fact, that the world can't return to a place of kids playing under the blue skies, rather than behind a blue screen.
The exposure of the sun on skin, better and more nourishing than the exposure to the evils of social media.

As a viewer you try to genre-ify Adolescence, such is our web series weaning, our crime drama conditioning - is it a whodunnit, whydunnit, docudrama, family drama, dark mystery, crime drama… but you just cannot straight jacket the series.

It's a disruptive show - with a camera technique that seeks not to disrupt your attention, but to highlight the various emotions expressed by its ensemble cast, from pain, from pondering, from a pause, from the pouring of tears, to passive aggressive behaviour, from pubescent anger, from peer pressure, to parent child problems, and yet no furious cutting, no flashback to guide us into back stories, what you see is what you get, character is action. When queried about he managed the continuous "camera take" technique, Stephen Graham talked of having two cameramen, handing each other the same camera, a woman walking upstairs, is "followed from behind" by cameraman one, camera handed to cameraman two, who seamlessly now shoots the actress from in front. A show of this nature, where one shot is 60 minutes, it is like theatre with no cuts, no retakes, months of preparation, one small mistake and you begin again.

The show differentiates between protagonist and perpetrator - the antagonist is unseen, it is society, it is the education system, it is the government, it is Instagram, it is that devil in one's mind. Indian filmmakers, have reacted quite strongly to this show, screaming at the streaming platform, for disallowing them to make similar content. This intrigues me, we have the same ruthless anarchic environment, young boys raping young girls, Generation Alpha morphing from Hardy Boys to boys quite hardy with a knife, and violence, angst overspilling, from our schools to our streets - but are we ready, to make or to consume such content , can indigenous be so uninhibited?

Adolescence is a relentless experience, raw in its refinedness. It isn't gimmicky, when a camera that has explored a room, and its inhabitants, stops like a drone - at one point Jamie's alpha male, belying his Gen Alpha status, baits the female therapist, he relentlessly attacks her, with all that is innate in him, and learnt, weird psycho sexual behaviour, she is scared, but knows he can't physically scar her, the camera stops, more interested in her flickering fear than Jamie's frontal attack, the camera only moves on when it feels, she's finished reacting.

As great as Owen Cooper is as Jamie, in my book, the 240 minutes belongs to Stepehen Graham's Eddie Miller, a plumber by trade, a father in distress, trying to hold it together, simultaneously, traumatised knowing his son is a killer, guilt ridden wondering where he went wrong, a deer in the headlights as he is now Public Enemy No. 1's dad, crisscrossing between repressed grief and residual anger, a working man, wondering where he could have gone wrong, what could have led his son's waywardness.

"On and on the rain will fall like tears from a star, like tears from a star. On and on the rain will say how fragile we are, how fragile we are"
-Sting (used at the climax of Episode 2)

Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com