The Slap, Episode 5, “Rosie”
Thursday, 8:30pm, ABC1
Stream on ABC’s iView
In the triage system of things I wanted to do over the weekend, watching The Slap was right near the bottom. I feel way too *artificial internet emotion redacted* to confess to what I ended up watching instead. But I will say that when I finally did iView the latest chapter, even though it did not have nearly enough reasons to lead me in to a YouTube K-hole of Robert Downey Jr. singing Bruce Springsteen to Calista Flockhart, it was still a really good episode.
Usually Australian TV is about people aspirational enough to have someone come and make a show about them: sexy lawyers, sexy doctors, sexy cops, sexy young people having a sexy fun time in the sexy prime of their lives. This week’s protagonist is a study in unlikability and any possible symbols of sexiness (Melissa George goes topless) are used to talk about something super heavy. Rosie is mum to Hugo, grimly preoccupied by her moral crusade against Harry, the man who slapped him on Episode 1. She is stubborn and insecure about her choice to press charges, and she spends the episode fostering Hugo’s thriving oedipal complex and seeking out relationships with others on the grounds that they will replicate her existing views. Rosie becomes defensive and sulky the instant her husband Gary, Aisha and Anouk or her new friend Shamira dare to demur.
It’s interesting, for a change, to get inside the head of someone so uncharming. She is the antidote to the winningly flaky Nina Proudman of Offspring (/Ally McBeal). Deprived of the flashbacks in the book we don’t really get why Rosie is such a dartboard full of issues, and she arrives too defective for us to really tell how this incident changed her world and where she’ll go from here. I think this characterisation did a disservice to the relatability of the debate that lies at the heart of this show. It is not unreasonable for a mother to feel fury over a non-family member thwacking her child, but piling on her personal flaws makes it tricky to separate the logic and humanity from the general dysfunction.
This episode feels a bit like getting billeted to a dud family, as we experience lots of real time scenes in Rosie’s home. And although Hugo is further brutalised throughout for strictly expositional purposes (at one point he looks at Shamira’s hijab and asks ‘why do you wear that hat and what is God?’, setting off a self-consciously controversial religious expression subplot), the big centerpiece is the court case about his slap.
The court scene is masterful. It renders the mundanity and fear of the legal process without foregoing the lively argumentation we’ve come to expect of a sxc courtroom drama. It’s a costuming triumph too- Rosie and Gary arrive in shapeless polyester-blend suits and Harry and his wife Sandi come dressed for an Underbelly funeral. It is clearly the most important day of these characters lives, it is not about the psychodramas of the lawyers who are perfectly happy being exactly themselves (Rosie’s evenly chipper legal aid lawyer was a nice detail.)
A set-up like this promises a definitive legal verdict as a conclusion. And that is why Rosie bursting in to tears on the stand is completely blind-siding. It functions exactly how someone bursting in to tears does in real life. It surprises everyone, not least the burst-er in to tears-er, and no-one knows where to look or what to say next. But they don’t give us any choice about where to look as the scene goes on for a long, sad, painful amount of time. She has crumbled because Harry’s lawyer asked her about abandoning Hugo as a small child and breastfeeding while drunk. Her one source of light – motherhood – gets called in to question. She had expected the law to validate her little world and not only was it persuasively invalidated, but it scoffed at her expectation of anything otherwise. But then she finds out she lost the case, tells an old Greek man to ‘fuck off’, and it’s like watching the customer in front of you be unforgivably rude to the woman at the counter. It’s hideous!
Rosie responds to the loss by becoming the foul haired, red-wine-teeth-stained, cardigan-wearing grieving woman that populates Australian dramas. She colludes with a 4 year old to ignore Aisha at the front door. She asks her (I think they are Muslim? Does anyone know if they are Muslim?) friends Bilal and Shamira to help her pry her mouth-breathy husband Gary from a pub, and then humiliatingly misinterprets Bilal’s intensity as flirtation. Instead, he denounces her entire way of life and asks her not to contact his wife or family again, which IS sorta hot. Rosie is beautiful and seems infantilized, like Amanda Knox or Betty Draper. Only in this version, having a problem-drinking husband leads to very unstylish times indeed.
The Slap sort of makes me want to *Unsubscribe* from Australia. It is so full of darkness and pessimism about people. The glass is not only half empty, someone put Rohypnol in to too. The series is a presentation on the many abortive models of a relationship – Rosie provokes and then fails to confront her husband’s worst qualities, Aisha is blithely unaware of Hector’s failings and Sandi willingly submits to Harry’s. It’s not that there is absolutely nothing nice in the show – there is – the kids giggle, the parents occasionally look attracted to each other and Aisha seems to like being a vet. But they never seem to try to learn anything from each other or if they are about to, we don’t get to see it – it’s time for the next episode, time to watch someone else chafe against the world.
The only optimistic current running through The Slap is its professionalism and the inevitable award-yielding nature of the production – knowing that clever Australian filmmakers and writers and actors have made this is pretty cool.
This has been another recap!
Words by Sophie Braham
