Shiny Shiny Bright New Hole In My Heart (TV)

Shiny Shiny Bright New Hole In My Heart

(Synopsis & Reviews)

Synopsis:

Shiny Shiny Bright New Hole In My Heart is a cautionary tale about addiction. In this case, it’s shopaholicism. Nathalie, a personal shopper at a department store. Her job makes her crave her clients’ extravagant habits and she begins a reckless spending spree.

Critics’ Reviews: (#1)

The title of Marc Munden‘s drama Shiny Shiny Bright New Hole in My Heart (BBC Two) sounded like a literal translation from the Chinese, or the name of a song that REM had wisely rejected.

Yet behind its unwieldy title lay a tighter tale of addiction. Nathalie (Sally Hawkins), despite loving her GP husband (Steven Mackintosh) and her job as a personal shopper in a Manchester department store, was discontent. As she remarked to her rich client and friend, Maya (Daniela Nardini): “I could never be pretty enough or girly enough or good enough or thin enough for my mother.” Unlike Maya’s “because I can” attitude to shopping, Nathalie saw the next purchase as the “one” to make her feel beautiful or happy. Of course it never did and she slid inexorably into horrendous credit-card debt.

If this had been an ITV drama, it would have been an over-stretched two-parter with Tamzin Outhwaite as Nathalie resorting to blackmail and murder to resolve her debts. But Munden made his story a taut 75 minutes. He didn’t always avoid the didactic tone of social-issue dramas that soon has “If you have been affected by the issues raised in this programme” and a helpline number ringing in your head. Yet he leavened it with humour: “Look, even David Beckham wore a sarong,” said a footballer’s wife. “Yeah, but I’m only playing for Rochdale,” replied her husband.

Munden‘s camera kept hovering over shoulders or peering round corners and doors as if, like Nathalie, we couldn’t shake off her addiction. Shot in oppressively dull wintry light, it made odd viewing in the middle of a July heatwave. Yet it was full of telling images, from Nathalie kneeling in front of her wardrobe as if it were an altar to the Pretty Woman template for shopping-spree montages becoming an indictment of easy credit. This was a case of shop till you drop everyone in it.

Admittedly, the film went awry when Nathalie’s latest attempt to buy her young daughter’s affection was a pony that seemed to be left munching in their suburban back garden for several weeks. And you did wonder why it took Nathalie’s husband so long to start looking at credit-card statements. But thanks to superb, quietly intense performances by Hawkins and Mackintosh, this remained an absorbing drama. The ending hinted that a recovering Nathalie might be returning to her bulimic past, swapping one addiction for another, while her daughter pushed a trolley towards her with a shopping-centre flag that proclaimed “Trainee Shopper“.    ~ Ian Johns, The Times 27/7/06

Critics’ Reviews: (#2)

It took a while to get to the bottom of things in Shiny Shiny Bright New Hole in My Heart. Something was up. You could tell by the sense of hush that attended the camera as it idled through the opening scenes, forcing us to fish for something significant amid the muted goings on, beneath the worrying surface of piano and strings. Here was Natalie, a consultant at a high-end designer store, offering sartorial advice to a footballer accompanied by his girlfriend – she quietly hectoring, he hesitant in the face of a flamboyant jacket. ‘Have you not seen what David Beckham wears?’ the girl said. ‘I’m not David Beckham. I play for Rochdale,’ the man replied. It was an amusing line, but you got the feeling it wasn’t for laughs. This wasn’t about footballers’ wives.

We moved on to an opulent apartment where Natalie sold an expensive handbag in odd circumstances to a glamorous friend. At her own suburban home, we saw Natalie’s nervy arrival met by a frown from her mother, whose eyes saw something ours didn’t. Her eight-year-old daughter’s antennae twitched ominously. We saw Natalie eat cake in a strangely feral manner. We noticed the way her GP husband Jeremy opened a gift from his wife as if expecting to find a severed body part. Glances were exchanged. The air crackled with the unsaid. Was she a thief? A drunk? A child beater? A bulimic? An adultress? A secret lesbian?

As it turned out, this ambivalence was not simply a tease to jack up the suspense but to establish the gravity of whatever was going on – to have us witness its impact on the faces of people who cared. When we discovered that Natalie had an addiction to shopping, it was too late for anyone to consider it a joke or a pseudo-pathology belonging to daytime TV agony shows. Now it was all downhill. Spurred on by her wealthy role model Maya (played languid and louche by Daniela Nardini), Natalie scorched across town in a frightening retail frenzy, in and out of Harvey Nichols, buying her child’s affection with gifts (a pony was soon observing events from the family’s modest back lawn), loading taxis up outside the local Comet and taking delivery of tragically unaffordable luxuries.

Sally Hawkins excelled as a woman heading for the abyss in pursuit of a terrible, exhilarating obsession. Steven Mackintosh, as the husband, looked every inch a man whose foundations were sliding beneath the weight of unwanted kitchen equipment. We could do with more single dramas like this one.    ~ Phil Hogan, The Observer 30/7/06

Critics’ Reviews: (#3)

In a recent article in the New York Magazine (which, in the name of full disclosure, I should mention I was directed to via Blissblog, critic and writer Simon Reynolds’s full-on arty-farty, fascinating music blog) I came across the phrase “hedonic treadmill”. It was coined by an American academic called Philip Brickman whose research field was happiness, which I’m afraid didn’t stop Brickman jumping off the top of the tallest building in Ann Arbour at the age of 38 back in 1982. The phrase refers to the idea that you can never get enough in this life.

There is always something else to acquire, to chase, to own, and it jumped into my mind while watching last night’s BBC2 drama Shiny, Shiny Brand New Hole in My Heart. Nathalie, played by Sally Hawkins, all sharp angles and geometric haircut, is definitely on the hedonic treadmill, running up thousands of pounds of debt as she tries to buy herself happiness, love and contentment. “Every time I buy something,” she says at one point, beginning to acknowledge her problem, “I’d think this is going to be the one, this is going to make me beautiful, happy. But I know when I’m buying it it’s not the one.”

Working in retail is a recipe for envy. In my own days as a bookseller every day was spent hovering between paradise and purgatory, surrounded by all these books that I could never afford to buy (working in retail is also a recipe for earning the minimum wage). It is probably rather worse for Nathalie. She’s a personal shopper in Manchester’s swanky designer store, spending her days picking out gorgeous items for her rich clients – in particular, Daniela Nardini‘s seriously well heeled Maya – to treat themselves to. Maybe it’s little wonder that Nathalie fancies treating herself as well.

Actually, it’s clear from early on that she has something of an addictive personality. The way she digs into a slice of her daughter Sophie’s birthday cake speaks of a troubled relationship with food (she was, we learn later, a teenage bulimic) and when she starts turning up late every night with increasingly extravagant gifts for Sophie it’s clear that her problems have taken on a new form. Soon there’s a rather bemused looking pony making a mess of the back garden of their suburban house (wouldn’t the neighbours complain?). She follows that up with a flash car for her doctor husband and then peaks with a £24,000 diamond-encrusted watch (a two credit-card purchase, that one).

As Nathalie, Hawkins brings a fluttery, avian tremor to the role. It’s a subtly wrought physical piece of acting that never degenerates into actor’s tics but spells out the nature of her character’s addiction without her saying a word. Maybe that’s just as well since director and writer Marc Munden is not one for overdoing the dialogue. So much of the drama emerges from what is unsaid – the looks that pass between Nathalie and her mother in lieu of a relationship, an exquisitely played pantomime show of politely disguised embarrassment when Nathalie asks Maya for the loan of money to help her with her credit-card bill. But then to some degree Munden is happy to keep the viewer in the dark. (Literally, at times. Everything seems filmed in permashadow. Did the lighting assistant just not turn up or something?) He never hits us over the head with a lecture on the complicit ease with which banks, building societies and shops give us buy-now, pay-later credit, though it’s entirely evident. Munden seems keen to lend a sheen of cool, European distance to what he’s doing. And mostly succeeds. All of which makes the overexplicitness of the final shots – by which time Nathalie has run up a five-figure debt, had the family house repossessed and is beginning to take her first faltering steps to recovery – all the more bemusing.    ~ Teddy Jamieson, The Herald 27/7/06

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