Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning, The Great bloopers
One element of Billy that Sam Claflin really beautifully portrays is the battle Billy is having with himself not to give into his addictive inclinations. In the book, Billy says of Daisy, “When someone’s presence gives you energy, when it riles up something in you -- the way Daisy did for me -- you can turn that energy into lust or love or hate. I felt most comfortable hating her.” Sam surfaces the implications of that statement by making clear, through Billy’s coiled physicality around Daisy, that the same creative energy Daisy unlocks in Billy unsettles him to a dangerous degree because it brings him closer to his addiction. Billy quickly senses that Daisy is a threat to the control he craves, and because of the mirror she holds up to him, she is a threat to the level of self-delusion Billy is employing as a means of keeping it all together. Sam’s body language in Billy and Daisy’s early scenes practically screams “I need a drink”. Notice how tense Billy is during his initial interactions with Daisy -- the clenched jaw, balled up fists, fidgeting, constantly reaching for a cigarette.
This tension stands out in contrast to the freedom of movement Riley gives Daisy.
And this scene at the close of episode 3 really shows Billy’s fear and trepidation, his instinct to hold himself away from the high of his and Daisy’s connection...
In conflict with his instinct to give into it.
Sam warms Riley up during the Aurora cover shoot
Sam Claflin and Riley Keough on the Daisy Jones press tour
“Leonardo DiCaprio. That's what was going through my mind. I had seen Titanic seven and a half times in theatres, he was the love of my life.”
-Emma Stone, on receiving her Oscar from Leonardo DiCaprio
Shout out to Max Minghella’s performance in 5x10 (and overall this season). The little moment where Nick is turning away from Tuello on the bridge and kind of taps the top of his own head is so out of character for Nick, who is usually very physically still and contained. With that moment and the way Nick is always fidgeting with his tie, Max really finds a way to communicate the rising tension and repression that bursts forth from Nick this episode.
On Anthony’s watch
Anthony’s watch is a physical manifestation of the trauma surrounding his father’s death. In season 1, he often checks it while with Siena. When she jokes that she will someday “take it apart bit by bit”, he emphasizes its importance as an heirloom passed down from his father, yet he resents its implications. Here the watch-checking signifies the burden and call of the familial responsibilities Anthony seeks to escape through Siena.
By season 2, Anthony’s duties as viscount can no longer be avoided. Early on he’s seen checking his watch as he methodically seeks out a wife. The scene, cut in hasty montage, is notably scored to an orchestral cover of Nirvana’s “Stay Away”. The opening lines? “Monkey see, monkey do (I don’t know why).” Anthony’s trauma only allows him to pursue marriage transactionally, a series of empty gestures. He is afraid to go past the surface because his construct of love is inextricable from grief, loss, and resentment. As he tells Lady Bridgerton, he desires a partnership “untouched by heartbreak and the ravages of grief” that his father’s death wrought.
Anthony’s defensiveness is grounded in an overwhelming fear of death, of leaving someone with the unexpressed grief and trauma he was left with. Anthony is haunted by time -- by how suddenly it can be taken away. The foundation for the watch motif is laid in season 1, when Lady Bridgerton catches Anthony checking it and remarks, “Time, as we both know, is certainly of the essence.” Her observation underscores the watch’s symbolic import as a metaphor for Anthony’s anxiety around mortality.
When Anthony turns the watch over and over in his hands or checks it as tic, we are seeing him grapple with his fear of the future or lack thereof. In episode 8, Lady Bridgerton urges Anthony to visit the bedridden Kate. “I do not have time for this,” he replies. Jonathan Bailey doesn’t play Anthony’s response as impatience, but almost as a plea. Anthony is not sure if he has the emotional capacity to confront Kate’s accident and what it means for him, the near impossibility of opening himself up to more loss. “I was fearful of losing you,” Anthony tells Kate just before they mutually declare their love for one another. His ability to succumb to love is predicated on finally naming his fears.
Simone and Jonathan try to keep a straight face
Timothee attempts to identify the kind of company Amy would run in modern times.
The Rewards of Romanticism, in “To All the Boys: Always and Forever”
Spoilers for To All the Boys: Always and Forever and Promising Young Woman
About halfway through To All the Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean Covey frets over the color of her prom dress. She has promised to match boyfriend Peter Kavinksy’s tux in navy, but a pink dress calls to her. “Is the pink more me?” she asks her best friend, Chris.
The audience could surely answer. Lara Jean’s preferred pinks (and yellows and blues) are splashed across the film, from a hotel’s interior design in Seoul, to the cap of Lara Jean’s pen, to a crucial dorm-room couch. The pops of pink, neon to pastel, signify Lara Jean’s version of rose-colored glasses – her lens of romanticism, her subscription to what one might term “rom-com theory.”
Lara Jean’s sacred texts are historically coded as feminine, and thus devalued. Chick-lit cannot become literary canon. Meet-cutes and their attendant love stories are trite. Pink, for that matter, is too girly to be substantive.
This hyperfeminine color palette is weaponized in the recent Promising Young Woman. Carey Mulligan’s Cassie inhabits a Candyland of clubs, diners, and cafés. She paints her nails in soft pink, dons a dress of rosebuds with a plait and yellow ribbon. She works as a barista in a café with teal shelves and baby blue-frosted cake pops. She wears a rainbow wig as she’s strangled to death.
These signifiers of womanhood – girlhood, really – are meant to cause dissonance, to seduce and eventually clash with Cassie’s seemingly violent means and end. How silly, to think that any guys are nice, that women are safe, that love can win. To be female is cute, until it isn’t.
The adult audience, thus, is set up to view Lara Jean as naïve – surely, her comeuppance will arrive, her tropes will be undermined and her pastels chipped. Real life will cast its shadow.
It never happens. To All the Boys upends convention by rewarding Lara Jean’s conventionality. For an audience conditioned toward cynicism, this twist is as effective as the close of Promising Young Woman. Cassie gets hers, as you knew she would. The real surprise is that Lara Jean gets hers, too.