Monica - Part Five
2015 · 10m · USA
Directed by Doron Max Hagay, Lily Marotta
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, melancholic
Penultimate-feeling episode of the web series fictionalizing Monica Lewinsky's 2001 New York life. The stakes are still small, the silences still loaded, the year 2001 still looming.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Five episodes in and it still refuses to deliver a tidy beat. Beautifully bratty pacing.
By episode five the series has earned the right to drift — late-Atlanta airiness applied to a tabloid ghost. The luxury of letting fame-as-weather just exist in a room.
By five, the series has earned its drift — a luxury most short-form work never grants itself, and the small-stakes intimacy at this point in the run is the texture I'm chasing. Slightly diminishing returns on a serial premise, but the chemistry holds.