Once in a while mainstream filmmaking pulls out all stops in the intimacy department, so much so that the borderline between mainstream and underground filmmaking tends to dissolve.
This is not always a bad thing. In the erotic and monstrously successful 365 days, Netflix had to intervene after streaming when audiences complained about certain parts of the anatomy showing when it shouldn’t be.
In The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime Video, actor-co-director Robin Wright, who some may remember as Tom Hanks’ troubled girlfriend in Forrest Gump
, plays an over-possessive mother whose protectiveness towards her son borders on the unhealthy, even incestuous.
Ms Wright, always bright but never bold, here plays the provocative Mom with tremendous force. Wright doesn’t judge her character Laura Sanderson. Neither does the actress allow her own inhibitions and moral thresholds (whatever they might be) to hold down the character.
Some of Laura’s motherly love would make the more conservative viewer squirm: the way the mother and son swim together , discuss his love life, the lip locks, the way she barges into his intimate moments with his girlfriend, etc. These are not normal by any standards, and Daniel (played by Laurie Davidson who played Shakespeare in Shekhar Kapoor’s neglected series Will) is not your normal Mama’s Boy.
It would be an understatement to say that the sexual tension in the series is palpable. The mood is distinctly erotic, but never idiotic. Robin Wright knows how far to go and when to pull back.
I still found some of the content excessively erogenous. Even lurid.
But the series is insanely entertaining. The cat-and-mouse game between the mother and the son’s new girlfriend Cherry (Olivia Cooke, resounding in her social climbing tricks) never slackens. The locational shifts are swift and appealing. No expense has been spared to make the series look chic and span. Spain has never looked more inviting. Ditto the Mother, Son & The Comely Dost.
