Ms Mean Machine: The Undoing/ Hyena

So The Undoing is awful and no amount of gorgeous cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle can obscure this fact. At six episodes, it’s five episodes too long with atrocious acting from Hugh Grant and a turgid script from David E. Kelley. The Undoing is supposed to be a story about how Nicole Kidman’s character managed to outwit a high-functioning psychopath. Instead we’ve got a show that is partly an Architectural Digest photo spread, partly a salute to Kidman’s cosmetology team and entirely a bore. It’s obvious right from early on that only one person could have committed the murder and no matter how many times director Susanna Bier attempts to distract the audience by dangling Matilda de Angelis in various stages of undress* before the camera, it comes as no surprise that the murder was in fact committed by the chap who was accused of it in the first place. I haven’t read the novel that The Undoing is adapted from, but just on the basis of plot, I’d like to humbly submit, I’ve written a better whodunit.

The only bit of The Undoing that I did find interesting was Noma Dumezweni as the lawyer Haley Fitzgerald. Dumezweni, with her steel-wrapped-in-velvet voice and unblinking gaze, is stellar as the attorney who has no hesitation playing dirty if it will help her win the case for her client. She reminded me a little of Jung Geum-Ja from the Korean drama, Hyena, who is also a lawyer with few scruples and oodles of charisma. Only Geum-Ja is the protagonist of Hyena while Haley is a member of the supporting cast.

It takes a certain audacity to write a show around a character who is charismatic, abrasive, unethical and unlikeable. I suspect it takes something more than audacity to make that character a woman and write a story that makes the audience root for her despite the lead not asking for forgiveness for her immoral behaviour. To think it was K-drama that did this, rather than an HBO show.

[image error]Noma Dumewezni in The Undoing (the cinematography really is stunning in this show)

“People hire me to create muck,” Hayley says to a client in The Undoing. “Muck up the state’s case so that they can’t meet their burden.” There’s not a hint of apology or defensiveness in her face or her voice. At that moment, Hayley feels chilling, reliable, dangerous and a shelter from the storm, all at the same time. In her stillness and composure is the assurance that this woman can handle whatever may be thrown at her in a courtroom. Which is why it’s so disappointing to see her flustered, sputtering and unravelling in the last episode of the show. It just doesn’t add up to Hayley’s menacing cool in earlier scenes. After all, she’s a woman who remained mostly unflappable even when faced out of the blue with a murder weapon that could incriminate her client.

Focused as the script of The Undoing is on its stars (Kidman and Grant), it lets Hayley into the story relatively late and then sidelines her. The Undoing might have been a much more tense and gripping show if we’d followed Hayley around, watching her try to figure out what happened, what evidence she needs to suppress (and how) as well as who she needs to bring on the witness stand in order to get the jury to declare her client not guilty. But Hayley, with her steely immorality, is a secondary character. To place such a character at the centre of a show would be too much of a risk.

Hyena‘s writer, Kim Roo Ri (a woman, just FYI) takes that risk. Geum-Ja has no moral compass to speak of — from knife fights to honeytrapping someone, she’ll do whatever it takes to reach her goal. Additionally, Kim makes Geum-Ja an older woman. She’s played by Kim Hye Soo, who is 50 years old in life and 41 in the show (which is, from what I can tell, practically ancient in the context of K-drama, which is fixated upon youth and youngness like most forms of popular entertainment). On top of that, Kim gives Geum-Ja a love interest who is almost a decade younger than her and a colleague.

[image error]

In the course of the show, Geum-Ja goes up men, patriarchs and patriarchal structures. While she has her vulnerable moments, Geum-Ja is never weak and in her viciousness, she’s unparalleled. She’s close to the bottom of the social pyramid in a rigidly hierarchical society, and she’s determined to scramble to the top. Barring a few scenes, Kim Hye Soo aces this role. I can’t imagine any actress in Hollywood or Bollywood agreeing to do a part of an anti-heroine like Geum-Ja, let alone execute it with the flair that Kim Hye Soo does. With Ju Ji Hoon (who is delicious, very good and very occasionally ridiculous), she makes Hyena work. While watching it, I struggled with a lot of scenes in Hyena — aside from somewhat implausible details, it’s frequently high-strung and overdone; as though the show is compensating for its edgy plot by packaging it in a campy aesthetic. Often, it felt as though the story and the characters were being swamped by the over-the-top tone that the show’s directors chose. But the fact is that the excess doesn’t overwhelm Hyena‘s story. Months later, the ridiculous bits of the show are a blur, but not Geum-Ja with her gritted jaw and glinting eyes.

Compared to the six episodes of The Undoing, Kim tells Geum-Ja’s story over 16 hour-long episodes. It’s a lot of time and storytelling space, which is only a luxury if you can handle this sort of sprawl. Most of the K-dramas I’ve seen struggle with this and Hyena isn’t without its weak spots. But it’s worth remembering just how adventurous and genuinely bold this show is. Kim, like every other K-drama writer, was writing for regular, cable TV, rather than a (relative) prestige project like an HBO show. She had to include a host of tropes and write in twists and turns that will hold a mass audience’s attention — all of which she did without flattening out Geum-Ja’s complexity or pushing her towards socially-acceptable behaviour.

Meanwhile, David E. Kelley couldn’t keep Hazel from unravelling in a matter of about four episodes.

[image error]

*If any of you have ever wondered how the male gaze can be deployed by a female director, then look no further than how atrociously Bier films and treats the character of Elena Alves, played by de Angelis. Within moments of her first appearance on screen, she’s mostly topless because ostensibly she needs to feed her baby, but actually because Bier would like you to ogle at her. The next time we see her, she’s naked. Then she’s wearing a plunging neckline. Along the way, she gets to kiss both Grant and Kidman and there are a few sex scenes thrown in, here and there. And of course she ultimately gets bludgeoned to death so that she’s literally defaced and reduced to sexy body that is on display again and again and again. A+ for gratuitous violence and nudity. Well done, Ms Bier.