HBO’s sleazy The Idol has the worst line of dialogue you’ll hear all year
In the opening moments of Sam Levinson’s The Idol, red hot pop megastar Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp, Johnny Depp’s 23-year-old daughter) is commanded by a photographer to cycle through seven different emotions on cue. It’s worth making the most of these, because it’s six and a half more than you’ll see her deploy over the next hour and three quarters.
For the first two instalments of this colossally gormless series, Jocelyn’s face is frozen in a glassy-eyed, brink-of-tears moué, as she weathers the sheer relentless hell of being a rich, popular, conventionally attractive American woman in her early 20s who lives in an enormous mansion in Los Angeles.
This HBO drama about a Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus-like pop star on the edge is the brainchild of Euphoria creator Levinson, nightclub mogul Reza Fahim, and Abel Tesfaye, otherwise known as pop star The Weeknd. And when it was announced the opening two (of five) episodes would be screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, critics’ nostrils started twitching: the scent of a fiasco was already on the wind.
In April last year it was announced that much of the show would be reshot at great expense, due to a fallout between its original director, Amy Seimetz, and Tesfaye, who was concerned her take on the material had foregrounded a “female perspective”.
Well, the new take, directed by Levinson, certainly can't be accused of that. If there was ever any satirical or cautionary element in this story of a young woman being chewed up by the fame machine, it’s now nowhere to be seen: overall you’d have to say the show is extremely pro the chewing, and in fact thinks the chewing is desperately sexy and hot – and perhaps even hashtag-empowering, if you squint a bit.
The interminable opening scene involves Jocelyn begging with her management to let her go topless for a photoshoot – her body, her choice, yeah? – even though it would mean flouting her “nudity rider”, which takes 48 hours to amend. (If The Idol had been made in the 1970s – and the seedy, dust-flecked glow of the cinematography suggests it very much wishes it had been – “Nudity Rider” could have easily been Depp’s character’s name.)
Honestly, congratulations to the screenwriters for finding the one area in which the argument for women’s bodily autonomy overlaps with the interests of boggle-eyed lechers. And further showcases of girl power in practice await, including lingering camera pans over Jocelyn strangling herself while masturbating on the sofa, Jocelyn shrugging “It could be worse” when an explicit sexual image of herself (and yes, we see it) is leaked on Twitter, and Tesfaye wrapping Jocelyn’s dressing gown around her face during a tryst at her home recording studio, supposedly in order to help her rediscover “her voice”.
With the release of her comeback single approaching and the recent death of her mother still causing her torment, Jocelyn is terrified that she’s a spent force. But it turns out a relationship with this sleazy nightmare – whose name is Tedros, and who appears (on the basis of the first two episodes) to be the Svengali of some kind of underground sex cult – is just the ticket for restoring her creative edge.
Notably, of all the characters Tesfaye helped create for the show, his is one of the few who isn’t required to spend their time on screen parading around in their underwear – or less. But he has given himself some eyebrow-raising dialogue, including (I’ve replaced the body parts with vegetables, to render the thing publishable): “I want to grab you by the pumpkin while you suffocate on my parsnip”. For one thing, it’s just fatuously graphic – surely the very worst line of dialogue we’ll hear all year. For another, the basic bodily logistics are baffling: pulling off this manoeuvre would require the physique of Mr Tickle. Sex talk that manages to be a turn-off in two different ways is some screenwriting feat.
Even the music is dreadful. Films like Vox Lux and A Star is Born ensured their characters were equipped with the sort of huge, instant-classic pop and rock tracks their status demanded. Jocelyn’s forthcoming single, World Class Sinner, on the other hand, features the line “I’m wild as a stallion so come down the rodeo,” followed by a sound effect of a horse whinnying. Perhaps Showgirls-style notoriety beckons, though if The Idol ends up being critically redeemed by 2043, I’ll eat my hat.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. On Sky Atlantic from Monday 5 June
