THE SYMPATHIZER
SKY/NOW
Heads-up: even if you didn’t know you wanted one, here’s a drama to make you think. The Sympathizer covers a slice of relatively recent history – the Vietnam War and its aftermath – that isn’t ‘our’ history and isn’t told from an American perspective.
For those of us raised on Vietnam stories such as Apocalypse Now or Platoon, or even the satirical comedy of Tropic Thunder, this is a very different, refreshing take.
The thriller-cum-black-comedy-satire – not a description I use very often – is based on a Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and was co-created and directed by the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (winner of 2022’s Best Director prize at Cannes for his compelling romantic mystery Decision To Leave).
The Sympathizer stars Hoa Xuande (left) as a police chief known only as the Captain while Robert Downey Jr (right) plays four different characters, including the CIA’s Claude
Mostly delivered in English with occasional subtitles, it stars Robert Downey Jr, fresh from his Best Supporting Actor Oscar in Oppenheimer, and Killing Eve’s fabulous Sandra Oh.
The rest of the cast is mostly south-east Asian with a relatively unknown Aussie actor of Vietnamese descent, Hoa Xuande, outstanding as our anti-hero: a police chief known only as the Captain.
We first meet him in a North Vietnamese re-education camp, under pressure to confess, before flashing back to South Vietnam a few months prior to the fall of Saigon.
Here, we discover that the Captain is a double agent working in cahoots with the US (Downey’s CIA agent, Claude) while also passing information to the North Vietnamese Communist army.
It turns out that the Captain has a Vietnamese mother, a French father and a past as a student in California; it’s this tension that appears to inform his decision to betray, well… everybody.
By the end of the first episode, Saigon has fallen and in the emotional and physical chaos the Captain is en route to a new life in Los Angeles. At which point (not having read the book), I found myself very keen to know where on Earth – other than Los Angeles – we would be heading. And if I haven’t yet done enough to persuade readers that this could be your kind of telly, my apologies.
The Sympathizer is a show that needs a helping hand in that respect – especially, I think, for British audiences – however it will more than reward those viewers who want to embark on the journey.
UK writer Kathryn Flett (pictured) gave The Sympathizer a 4-star review
While I found the first episode’s back-and-forth fairly hard to navigate (not to mention revealing of my ignorance of aspects of the war), by the second hour I was entirely hooked.
Each episode, incidentally, is almost a stand-alone ‘chapter’ with its own tone; a device that will not only (cleverly) keep viewers on their toes but also keep them wondering what the scene-stealing Robert Downey will be doing next, because (here’s the mild spoiler!) he plays four different characters, including the CIA’s louche Claude.
Ultimately, though, despite ever-watchable Downey (Sandra Oh is terrific, too), it’s Hoa Xuande’s show – and what a star he turns out to be.
Brilliant benedict’s unmissable
ERIC
NETFLIX
In this unmissable six-part thriller, Benedict Cumberbatch is brilliant as unlikeable New Yorker Vincent Anderson. Creator of a Sesame Street-style kids’ TV puppet show called Good Day Sunshine, Vincent is married to Cassie (Gaby Hoffman), father to nine-year-old Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe)… and an alcoholic bully.
The first time Vincent lets his son walk to school alone, Edgar goes missing. The press is swiftly all over the breaking story – Vincent’s father is a wealthy NY property developer and philanthropist, and the prominent family are already at loggerheads.
Eric (pictured) is a giant furry puppet recalling Monsters, Inc’s Sulley
Meanwhile, Michael (Ozark’s McKinley Belcher III) – the NYPD cop assigned to the investigation – has his own secrets.
Unfolding against the politics, corruption, social and sexual mores of the 1980s, the show’s New York backdrop both looks and feels convincingly drawn; it’s written by the fantastic British screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady).
And the debut appearance of the titular Eric – a giant furry puppet recalling Monsters, Inc’s Sulley – ensures that anybody who, perhaps, grew up the only child of warring parents (and retreated into their imagination in order to cope) will find this wonderful cliché-busting series powerfully moving, too.
Oh the joy of Jessica…
Stephen Merchant’s The Outlaws (BBC iPlayer) is back for a third series. I find its balance between humour – great one-liners are often thrown away – and wannabe thriller to be slightly skewed.
In The Outlaws, Jessica Gunning (pictured) plays Diane, the ‘community payback’ officer in charge of a motley bunch of law-breakers
But it’s good to be reminded how brilliant Jessica Gunning (Baby Reindeer’s Martha) is as not-as-smart-as-she-thinks-she-is Diane, the ‘community payback’ officer in charge of a motley bunch of law-breakers.
Travelogues in which fish-out-of-water celebs try local delicacies or hike while making arch observations to camera are predictable – and we got all this in the first of a new series of The Misadventures Of Romesh Ranganathan on BBC2.
But what made it interesting was that he was grappling with a country – Uganda – in which the cultural chasm between his beliefs and his hosts’ was more unbridgeable than the scenic Kyambura Gorge. Find out how he fared on BBC iPlayer.
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