Thanks to Madame Tungate -who, as you may know, writes about fashion and related matters-, I've been watching a preview of an American TV series called Girls, currently available on Orange ciné max. The series is a sort of anti-Gossip Girl, tracing the lives of four twenty-something friends -the plain but clever one, the pretty but sensible one, the wild English one and the posh but naïve one- as they struggle to make ends meet in Brooklyn. They have terrible jobs and terrible boyfriends.
There are a number of unusual things about Girls. First of all, the sex. There is a lot of sex in the series and none of it is candlelit and romantic. Mostly it's crude and funny. I was also mildly irritated to find that the show's writer and star, Lena Dunham, seemed unable to create a male character who was not soft, loutish and emotionally stunted. It felt a little too much like vengeance. On the plus side, Girls captures our multimedia lives perfectly, from the constant Iphone ringtones to scenes of the girls tweeting and using Facebook. The main character, Hannah, complains that her boyfriend never replies when she sends an SMS. Turns out he prefers phone or, even better, face-to-face. This is so rare that Hannah didn't even consider it. Perhaps the real theme of Girls is the difficulty of achieving intimacy in a society where people hide behind digital walls.
