The Slap, Episode 4, “Connie”
Thursday, 8:30pm, ABC1
Stream on ABC’s iView
I need to take an acting class to learn to say someone is a good actor/bad actor with more authority. It’s from the ‘you have such a great group of friends’ school of of saying you had an only OK time at someone’s party. An elegant deflection – allowing you nothing whatsoever about the thing itself but still present as a supreme judge of the bigger picture, the craft, the human spirit and all that.
I just get nervous about getting sprung saying Sophie Lowe is really good at playing uninhibited and unselfconscious teen, if she’s really just an uninhibited and unselfconscious Sophie Lowe. Or does it not matter whether she’s comprehensively transforming in to something she’s not, as long as she’s able to capture realistic emotion? Watching Sophie Lowe’s performance in this week’s episode of The Slap made one thing very clear. Her presence is so commanding that I can already tell I will spend the rest of my health-professional waiting-room reading life enduring sycophantic profiles that talk about her skin. For Australian acting accolades are not measured in Oscars but in how many profile pieces reference a flawless make-up free complexion.
Sophie Lowe plays Connie Lang, a character who is herself a good little actress. She shifts effortlessly between her roles as high school girl, veterinary assistant and babysitter. She is sexually direct around Hector (the father of the kids she babysits and the husband of the vet she works for); supporting and agreeable around Rosie (the mother of the boy she babysits and the boy who was slapped), and she is perceptive and playful around her best friend Richie. She contains all these competing qualities, and we watch her improvise reactions to other people’s more established personalities, tenderly testing the boundaries of others by drawing eyeliner on their faces after school or propositioning them in the car ride home after babysitting. She doesn’t really draw us in to her decision making process – she talks in blank teen fragments. All we know is that she is seeking self-definition through the adults we have already spent some time around, Connie’s company helps us to know them better than her.
v/o: ‘Connie knew that Episode 4 was going to be about her, for Connie had read the book and seen the preview at the end of last weeks episode. So Connie did very many teen things, all the teen things she could think of’.
Much like the over-explanatory voice-overs peppered arrhythmically throughout each episode, this episode was a little too thorough in traversing every aspect of her sexual awakening. It is like a complete compendium of Dolly Doctor columns. By the way, Sophie Lowe deserves a million Oscars/column inches about having nice skin for her willingness to do lots of very embarrassing stuff on tv. See: bath scene.
I felt like she accessed a slightly different register of teen angst – she has many feelings but she is not incapacitated by them, instead, they give her agency to do lots of humiliating stuff. Connie isn’t pre-occupied by the usual parental tensions of the teen experience, as both her parents are dead, and she’s being raised by an aunt. I think it’s fair to assume her folks were Lily and James Potter because her loss manifests as uniqueness and an ability to take risks, not as moroseness. Also, when Richie asks her if he dad was a punk she’s all ‘sort of…’ and trails off suspiciously.
Several scenes in this episode are shot in filtered Sofia Coppola-esque light – but it’s cool how it’s not as aesthetically unified or uptight as those films – it captures an adorably confused teen wardrobe (slouchy tees and strapless shiny blue dresses) instead of frame upon frame of gauzy white cotton. Australian teens aren’t as archetypal as American teens, but we are no less charming!
Of course it wouldn’t be an episode of The Slap without every single character saying heaps of stuff about the slap. Every time we walk in on secondary characters mid-conversation they happen to be talking about the implications of the slap, or its administrative back-end-arrest, witness testimony, court dates, etc. Look, The Slap, High Distincton for breadth of argument. But having the slap as the only thing the characters seem to be able to talk about erodes the believability of the world around them- they are merely mouthpieces plucked to enact Important Social Discussion. These are not characters affected by an incident – they’re defined by it and invented for it.
That said, there’s a smart parallel in this episode. Connie’s secret relationship with Hector acts as an interesting stand-in for the slap – another good case study for the differences in people’s views. She, like Hugo in episode 1, provoked the man who took action, arguably involving him beyond his actual culpability (Harry gets charged with child assault, Hector gets accused of rape.)
The treatment of their relationship leaves me feeling more conflicted and engaged than the slap. I am heartbroken for Aisha and her false sense of ease in her marriage with Hector, and I am happy when Hector unequivocally rejects Connie by the end of the episode. But then she starts sobbing, pulls her hair out of it’s high ponytail in sadness and I’m like- oh gurl, you look much better with your hair out! You should’ve had it out when you propositioned him just before! You would’ve totally gotten what you wanted! Try again!’
Words By Sophie Braham
