"Waves of fury and righteousness intoxicated her..."
It's already episode five of The Slap, and many have been a little dazed at the way it so uncomfortably confronts us with the fractures of an uneasily assimilated multicultural society. The series is edgy and urgent, Christos Tsiolkas's dense novel cleverly elided into television-sized grabs, and it's just as upsetting as his hefty book, only
easier to digest and not so annoying, insists The Australian's Graeme Blundell. In many ways TV, less verbose than the novel as a form, sharpens the focus of his lacerating cultural gaze, fleshing out the personal, as some fine scripting reinforces Tsiolkas's pitiless dissection of suburban Australian living.
Many critics thought the soapie structure of the novel reduced its ambitions but it works on TV, all of the characters convincing when played by such interesting actors bringing their own idiosyncrasies and personal weight to them. The novel's precise and witty symmetry lends itself to episodic TV and we easily accept the separate narratives of those present following the slapping of a four-year-old boy by a man who isn't his father. Tsiolkas's slightly rough, journalistic prose makes for better dialogue than more considered literary writing, too. You can tell the actors love this script.
It bristles with tension and, as with the novel, provocatively pushes boundaries and questions lazy assumptions about race, sexuality, neighbourliness, masculinity and the unlovely spaces of contemporary families. Last night it was Rosie's story, her chance to explain her almost pathologically cloying attitude towards Hugo, the petulant, pampered boy who was slapped and with whom she is obsessed. She receives the notification of the court case, and waves of fury and righteous indignation intoxicate the litigious mother. Circumstances are subsequently examined with forensic detail, throwing even the most righteously held opinion about child-smacking into doubt.
The compelling performances of The Slap positively breathe with authenticity and rarely has subtle nuance and high emotion been so perfectly realised than by Melissa George as Rosie braves an emotionally and morally costly journey to and from the courtroom on her increasingly lonely crusade. Under the direction of Robert Connolly (Balibo), her face captures the anguish of a person whose rock-hard principles begin to crack under the harsh light of aggressive inquisition, not only from Harry's lawyer but also her fraying social set and her conscience.
In an interview conducted by ABC TV's blog, George compares the channel to the birthplace of The Wire, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm: "It was great just being able to be Aussie and tell a great Australian story. I have a slight American accent, but that was gone after a week! I didn’t come home just to do TV. I came home and did ABC, and to me that’s like Australia’s version of HBO. The ABC takes risks and they’re creative. It’s not about money, but about the craft and the work. That’s when I take a job." The actress stated she felt 'very protective' of her character from the earliest days of filming. "She’s just amazing and I love her," said George. "After the slap scene, when things got absolutely ballistic, I really felt very much in her shoes and started to understand what I would do if I were in her situation. A lot of people will respond to Rosie quite strongly.
When asked would she would say to those who don’t take her side, she replied: "What’s beautiful about The Slap is that each episode presents a different perspective on Rosie – the animal one , the sexual one, the maternal one, the warrior woman and so on. You also see her from everyone else’s eyes. For instance, in Episode 3, when Alex’s character Harry comes to apologise for slapping Hugo, Rosie’s behaviour may not be the way she actually is behaving but the way he sees her behave. Either way, you’ll make your decision and I hope you see another level to her. Everyone’s going to watch Rosie in their own way, but I do think you’ll feel for her at the end of the court scene. Rosie just wants justice for her child. She doesn’t want money out of it. She wants Hugo to know that what happened to him was wrong and what they did to him should never happen again. That’s all she wanted."
So back to that HBO comparison, where we suspect we already know the answer to the question of what was the most challenging part of the role... "Mainly the fact that there was nudity, as well as the breastfeeding," she admits. "There was also a lot of emotion in Rosie’s character. She’s very intense. Sometimes I’d come home and feel like she was taking her toll! But I’m doing these scenes that, as an actress, you don’t get to do a lot. I felt very European for some reason. I felt a lot like when you see Penelope Cruz doing a Spanish film – everything just fits. It sounds strange but with Penelope, there’s an expression in her performance in Spanish movies that’s not in her American movies. It’s great because you don’t have to worry about your accent. That’s the great thing about working on The Slap, though - every actor had to do something they wouldn’t necessarily want to do. We were all faced with these little challenges."
Indeed. In last night's epidode, George's 'little challenge' featured more nipple tweaking nudity than strictly necessary as the weirdness between Rosie, her four-year-old son, and her husband continued to swell in all the wrong places... Or so you might gather from the clip.
Television Series: The Slap (S01E05)
Release Date: November 2011
Actress: Melissa George
Video Clip Credit: DeepAtSea
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