Monica - Part Two
2015 · 10m · USA
Directed by Doron Max Hagay, Lily Marotta
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, melancholic
Episode two of the darkly comedic series following a fictionalized Monica Lewinsky at 27 in 2001 New York. Builds out her social world and the awkward proximity of celebrity to mundane errand-running.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Episode two — the part where a pilot proves it's a series and not a stunt. The deadpan widens; the joke deepens.
Hagay and Marotta let their famous-by-association protagonist do laundry — Girls-by-way-of-national-punchline. The negative-space approach to fame is the formal gesture.
Letting a famous-by-association protagonist just exist between plot beats — laundry, lunch, the drip of recognition — is the right register for this conceit. Episodic, small, but the Lewinsky-mundane juxtaposition keeps it interesting.