![]() Part of this process involves covering the walls of her bedroom with index cards depicting different beats of the story.Īs any good writer - and Coel (who wrote every episode and co-directed most of them with Sam Miller) is one hell of a writer - knows, where you choose to begin your story can say a lot about what kind of story you’re telling. In the penultimate episode, Arabella - with help from, of all people, Zain (Karan Gill), a fellow writer who previously had unprotected sex with Arabella without her consent, then tried to gaslight her about it - tries a different, more structured approach to finishing the novel she has struggled with all season. The show plays around with time and memory, and in hindsight, that opening shot takes place close to the end of the story, even though it’s the first thing we see. The series is deliberately confounding in its early chapters(*), the better to capture the sense of disorientation that Arabella feels both on the night she is drugged and raped, and over the ensuing weeks and months, as she realizes what happened to her and struggles with how to live with that knowledge. I admit that I did, and was surprised to see it when I looped back around to the premiere shortly after finishing the show’s remarkable finale. Presented so briefly, and out of context, at the start of a sad, funny, narratively intricate story about consent, sexual assault, and coping with trauma, it’s an easy image to forget. The premiere lingers on this image for only a few seconds before jumping to Italy to meet our heroine, social-media star turned novelist Arabella ( Chewing Gum star Coel). ![]() We are in a small, cluttered bedroom, the bedspread filled with notepads, pens, and scraps of paper, the walls covered with index cards. The very first shot of I May Destroy You occurs, like much of Michaela Coel’s incredible HBO limited series, outside the boundaries of time, and possibly reality. The awful things that happen to Arabella aren’t reserved for people in fictional stories or clichéd horror movies.This column contains full spoilers for HBO’s I May Destroy You, which aired its finale on Monday night. Coel plays her character brilliantly, with defiant wit and nuance. It’s an eye-opening, game-changing new show from one of Britain’s brightest talents. ![]() The same angle, on the same man, that Arabella can’t remember. Scenes are peppered with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them images, the same traumatic frames are repeated over and over. It flits between flashbacks of holidays and past flings, then back to present day police interrogations. Credit: BBCĪs mentioned previously, I May Destroy You tells its story through snatches of memory. ‘I May Destroy You’ arrives on BBC One on June 8. The soundtrack helps, too: a selection of infectious tunes by Easy Life, Sons of Kemet, DJ Medhi and more will make you want to go out dancing immediately. Date rape is the threat and the damage, but that doesn’t prevent Arabella from leading a sex-positive life, or partaking in recreational drugs with her best friend Terry (Weruche Opia) – be it MDMA, coke or ketamine. Not everyone has a smartphone, not everyone has a smartphone, not everyone has a smartphone.” With such wry comedy, an acknowledgement of the bigger picture – of privilege that manifests in class and wealth as much as gender and race – is executed tastefully and wittily.įor the most part, the story’s relationship with sex and drugs is paradoxical, and deeply intelligent. “There are hungry children, there are hungry children, there are hungry children. In moments of panic, when Arabella doesn’t want to inconvenience anyone, she repeats to herself a few meditative messages. As Arabella’s hedonistic, carefree lifestyle shatters, other people help her reconstruct the incident that brought everything crashing down. ![]() She doesn’t recall how she got home, or how she got the scar on her forehead.Įlsewhere, Coel walks a fine line with the show’s tone – its comic moments are boisterous, but there is also great sensitivity on display. Flashes of memory keep returning, images of a man looming over something, or someone. It does all that, and does it well, but the catalyst for everything is a violent event that Arabella can’t even remember. But this isn’t just a slice-of-life miniseries focusing on a young Black woman feeling her way through the big city. She plays Arabella, a talented young writer celebrated for her first book, now scrambling to meet the deadline for her second. Like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together while someone is hiding half the pieces, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You forces the viewer to fill in some of the plot at the same time as its protagonist – and it may be foolhardy to expect every question to be answered by the end.Ĭoel ( Chewing Gum) writes and stars in the show – a vibrant, entertaining London-set drama with a ferocious intensity.
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