Monday, December 24, 2012

Secret Diary of a Call Girl Overview: Series 02

Melodramatic Mondays
***½

Initially worried that her secret will be outed to the public without her control, Hannah questions whether or not she can continue her double life and still look her family in the eye. However, in taking control of the situation, Hannah soon realizes that a high profile reveal could lead to many more opportunities than she had had before. It's her fear of revealing the truth that keeps her from a stable relationship, but her desire to tell the truth may prove too much for her.

Previous: End to Beginning
Previous: Series 01 Overview

The second series focuses largely on Hannah's (Billie Piper) struggle to have a romantic relationship with someone that has no connection to her life as Belle and maintaining a separation between the two lives without letting her guilt get the better of her. As to Belle's struggle, not only must she work to keep the privacy of her clients safe, but she also is made something of a mentor to newcomer Bambi (Ashley Madekwe), whose plucky determination to make it on her own leads to a number of opportunities, both lucrative and dangerous, that Belle likely wouldn't have found herself getting into without her new friend's influence.

Putting a focus on Hannah's relationship with Alex (Callum Blue) allows the writers to really humanize her in a way that hadn't been done during the first series. Throughout the previous year Hannah/Belle has been living something of a fantasy, her ties to the world around her somewhat fleeting, and here Alex grounds her in a way that Ben (Iddo Goldberg) never could. Hannah had always been very adamant that romance had no place in her life, but through Alex she finds a desire to make it work, and for the first time she wants to live the life of a normal girl. Hannah has always told herself that, as long as she remains Belle, a romance could never factor into her life, and she continues to tell herself that throughout her entire relationship with Alex, but her feelings for him keep her from breaking things off. Eventually, when things come crashing down around her, we're witness to her attempts to alter her own reality, to take control of the world she let Belle have and make room for Hannah in it, and where her activities as Belle may not be relateable to everyone, her desire to be loved absolutely is, and it's the interaction between Hannah and Alex that really drives the bulk of this series.

During her first appearance, Bambi is something of an underhanded greenhorn when it comes to Belle's world, and she's little more than an annoyance to Belle at first. As the series progresses she grows out of her naïveté and quickly develops beyond Belle's student, becoming something of a friend to Belle when she doesn't even realize it. Even when Belle is ignoring Bambi, or speaking too harshly to her, Bambi is loyal to her to a fault, standing by her at the worst of times and looking to help her as she once helped Bambi. By the end of the series Bambi is the one that really has Belle's back, and having a female friend does wonders for Belle as a character. The inclusion of Bambi in this series allows Belle the chance to relate to someone within her own industry, outside of her relationships with Ben and Alex, and it gives her an extra outlet that was sorely missing throughout the first series.

Alex is devoted to Hannah beyond anything else, but there's never any real sense of what she's done to ensnare him so. Certainly there is a base attraction between them, and in the moments that they flirt with one another they are playful enough that the viewer can imagine a happy relationship between them. Unfortunately, Hannah is so flighty, due in part to Belle's life, that it's a wonder Alex doesn't walk away from the entire situation. Often Hannah is forced to leave abruptly, she hangs up on him without warning, and she's regularly very blunt and rude to him when they speak to one another. Overall, the bulk of what the audience is shown of their relationship is negative, and it serves only to make Alex seem like a bit of a doormat. There needs to have been more of a focus on the good times that the two of them have had together, otherwise their relationship seems nothing beyond physical.

In the latter half of the series Hannah makes sweeping claims that she's doing everything that she can in order to change her life and win Alex back, but what we're shown are her half-hearted attempts to change, followed by an intense disinterest in keeping her word. The job she finds to replace Belle is by no means glamorous, but it also is in no way difficult, and she quits after one day simply because she doesn't enjoy the work. Were she to keep a job she hated, while also trying to find other opportunities, then she would have every right to complain about her troubles, but here she just comes off as entitled and uncommitted to her relationship with Alex.

Madekwe really breathes a new life into the series, allowing Belle an ally in her work that she hadn't been privy to before and giving her a friend in situations where she sorely needed one previously. The consistency of Piper's scenes with Madekwe in contrast to her scenes with Goldberg and to Blue give the actress the chance to explore her character in different modes of life without seeming out of the blue or disjointed. Piper and Blue have a great chemistry as a couple, and the animosity between Blue's character and Goldberg is palpable.

The first half of this series, directed by Fraser MacDonald, is largely devoted to Hannah trying to balance a normal life against Belle's work, attempting to keep her secrets in check in order to spare Alex any pain, where the latter half of the series, directed by Peter Lydon depicts the consequences of her choices and the difficulties she faces in turning her life around. In the beginning Hannah is a little bit jaded, convinced that a life with Alex is nothing more than a fantasy and working, as Belle, to show Bambi how to make it in the world of prostitution. In Lydon's scripts, things have changed almost entirely, with Hannah convinced that she can change the world for Alex, while Bambi is the one trying to teach Hannah how to function in the world of love. The shift in Hannah/Belle's point of view, as well as Bambi's role in relation to the protagonist, is done very organically to the story and works because of how honestly the situations are depicted.

Hannah has gotten into the habit of giving up everything in order to live a life as Belle, and what's happened is that she's cornered herself in that reality. Even in moments where she considers the possibility of leaving it all behind her she realizes that she can't, in part because she loves her work more than anything else, but also because there will always be the ghosts of her past to bring her back to reality, whether they come in the form of nosy reporters, angry housewives, or suspicious boyfriends. No matter what Hannah does she will never fully be able to leave Belle's life behind, and she realizes as she tries to mend her relationship with Alex that she needs to fully embrace that side of herself, to have him accept that that's who she was, before she can really let him into her life. It's her own deceit in the end that's her undoing, and while she's broken over having lost Alex and having betrayed him once again, there's a part of her that's relieved to be allowed to grab hold of everything that she is once more and live the life she chooses. By choosing to write a book about her experiences, by sharing that intimate secret with the world, she is embracing her full potential as a person, and while this might be a way out of the game, it certainly wouldn't have allowed her to step far enough out of Belle's shoes for Alex's comfort, and still she would have been hurting him by sharing these stories. Hannah needs someone that can accept Belle before she can accept him, and until she finds that man she decides instead to focus on who she is on her own.

It's made fairly clear throughout the series that, in this line of work, there is a clear divide between the working life and the life one leads in the day, and that one has to make a choice between their work and their personal relationships. Prostitution is, in itself, a deception, and is difficult to work in tandem with a real life romance, and unless there is absolute transparency between both partners in a relationship, the lies will always cause a strain.

Next: Episode 3.1
Next: Series 03 Overview

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