Perfect Strangers,
perfect television
So I want to tell you about this BBC miniseries from 2001 that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about, and I realise that sentence already sounds like the beginning of a recommendation you didn't ask for but please stay with me because this will change your life.
Perfect Strangers. Stephen Poliakoff. Four episodes. Made at a time when the BBC would occasionally look at a filmmaker they believed in and essentially say, go. Just go. Here is money and here is time and we trust you, go and make something that will leave a mark. Go.
Poliakoff shoots close-ups the way some people are afraid to make eye contact which is to say he isn't afraid at all, he goes right in, he stays there and he waits. And the faces reward him. Every time. Because it turns out the human face, given enough time and enough trust will do something true and devastating.
The score doesn't tell you how to feel. It just arrives. Before the emotion does. The acting is the kind where you forget there's a camera. You forget there's a script. You forget you're watching television at all and then suddenly you remember, because something has happened in your chest that television doesn't usually do.
But there is this one scene.
Three sisters. Old. Watching photographs of themselves young. And already that's a beautiful scene, just sit with that for a second. The specific cruelty and beauty of looking at a photograph of yourself from fifty years ago. That person had no idea. She was just standing there. She didn't know yet.
And just before we cut away, one of the sisters, her back to us and we can't see her face, reaches up and touches her cheek. Gently. Just once.
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Poliakoff doesn't linger on it. He just lets it happen, and then we're somewhere else, and you're left sitting there holding this thing you've just witnessed, this completely wordless and completely devastating acknowledgment of time, of age, of the body that keeps changing while the photographs stay still.
That gesture exists because nobody told him he needed a close-up of it. Nobody made him shoot a version where we could see her face. He trusted the back of a woman's head as her hand lingers to her cheek, to break your heart and it does, it absolutely does.
This is what television looks like when the people making it are allowed to be serious about it. When the assumption is that you, the person watching, are a full human being with a full interior life who does not need every emotion explained and underlined and reflected back at you by a musical sting.
Perfect Strangers assumes you've felt things and that you know what it is to stand in a room full of family and feel the enormous distance between you and people you've known your whole life, or maybe haven’t. It assumes you understand that memory isn't clean, isn't linear, arrives sideways and smells like something and sits in the light differently than the present does.
So if you haven't seen it, and most people haven't, which is its own kind of sadness, I'm not going to oversell it or over-explain it because Poliakoff spent four episodes refusing to do exactly.
Just find it. Go.
Just go.
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Perfect Strangers. Stephen Poliakoff. Four episodes. Made at a time when the BBC would occasionally look at a filmmaker they believed in and essentially say, go. Just go. Here is money and here is time and we trust you, go and make something that will leave a mark. Go.
Poliakoff shoots close-ups the way some people are afraid to make eye contact which is to say he isn't afraid at all, he goes right in, he stays there and he waits. And the faces reward him. Every time. Because it turns out the human face, given enough time and enough trust will do something true and devastating.
The score doesn't tell you how to feel. It just arrives. Before the emotion does. The acting is the kind where you forget there's a camera. You forget there's a script. You forget you're watching television at all and then suddenly you remember, because something has happened in your chest that television doesn't usually do.
But there is this one scene.
Three sisters. Old. Watching photographs of themselves young. And already that's a beautiful scene, just sit with that for a second. The specific cruelty and beauty of looking at a photograph of yourself from fifty years ago. That person had no idea. She was just standing there. She didn't know yet.
And just before we cut away, one of the sisters, her back to us and we can't see her face, reaches up and touches her cheek. Gently. Just once.
Poliakoff doesn't linger on it. He just lets it happen, and then we're somewhere else, and you're left sitting there holding this thing you've just witnessed, this completely wordless and completely devastating acknowledgment of time, of age, of the body that keeps changing while the photographs stay still.
That gesture exists because nobody told him he needed a close-up of it. Nobody made him shoot a version where we could see her face. He trusted the back of a woman's head as her hand lingers to her cheek, to break your heart and it does, it absolutely does.
This is what television looks like when the people making it are allowed to be serious about it. When the assumption is that you, the person watching, are a full human being with a full interior life who does not need every emotion explained and underlined and reflected back at you by a musical sting.
Perfect Strangers assumes you've felt things and that you know what it is to stand in a room full of family and feel the enormous distance between you and people you've known your whole life, or maybe haven’t. It assumes you understand that memory isn't clean, isn't linear, arrives sideways and smells like something and sits in the light differently than the present does.
So if you haven't seen it, and most people haven't, which is its own kind of sadness, I'm not going to oversell it or over-explain it because Poliakoff spent four episodes refusing to do exactly.
Just find it. Go.
Just go.
Mon 6 April, 26