Author: Ross Ruediger (Page 11 of 16)

The final episode of Season One begins with a sweeping shot of London accompanied by some very regal music that leads into a speech from Belle (Billie Piper) about how living in London is all about class and sex is no different. As the camera pulls back we find ourselves along with Belle in a swank apartment overlooking the Thames. She’s with a client, movie producer Mitchell Rothman (Colin Salmon) and he tells her he thinks she’s ready to move up in the world and become a courtesan for Diamond International Courtesans, a company which sounds improbable in concept, but I’ve no doubt exists somewhere. (I’m very naïve about such matters.)

She goes to meet the three women who run the place, and the interview is about as humiliating as any job interview is. They dress her down, so that they can dress her up. They explain that being a courtesan is about being a companion as much as it is anything else. She must be learned in things like skiing and languages if she is to be successful. When Belle pipes up, “In the end, it’s all about fucking though, isn’t it?,” there aren’t many laughs from the other side of the room. Perhaps she is not quite as classy as she thinks she is? She takes a quick bathroom break to compose herself, comes back and makes a very impassioned speech about how damn good she is. One of the women finally says, “I like her.” So the job is hers and the first person she visits is Stephanie (Cheri Lunghi) so that she can do the typical “I quit” scene, of course in Belle’s case such a scene is littered with all sorts of details of her career that make it incredibly amusing. Stephanie is not amused, however. The second person she visits is Ben (Iddo Goldberg), and asks him to take some classy photos of her for the clients to peruse. It’s reassuring to know that hopefully some things won’t change. Piper looks fantastic in the photography montage! The pair briefly discuss Ben’s plans for upcoming domesticity and Belle’s future, as Ben puts it, “an uber-whore.”

Ben’s dialogue dovetails nicely into a shot of Mitchell going down on Belle. He looks up, tells her she deserves everything, and then gives her the swank apartment. She flips out and screams and the action cuts to Hannah and her mother packing up everything at her old place. Of course, her parents still know nothing of her career, believing that she still works in an office. Her mother says, “I still know nothing of your world,” which cuts to Hannah and her parents in the new place and her father saying, “I’m so proud of you!” It’s an uncomfortable moment because we know that he wouldn’t be proud of her at all if he knew the truth.

The life of a courtesan doesn’t involve just taking any man that comes along. Instead, Belle must interview possible clients and choose who she thinks will work out. Mitchell tells her “no more than four.” The more men she sees, “the less prestigious a courtesan is.” He says he’s going to Scotland shortly for a film and he’d like for her to come along. She does that and he bathes her and treats her like royalty, but when it’s time for him to go to work, she’s left completely alone. It’s as if she’s on call and must simply wait until he returns – after all, he’s paying and it’s not like she can go find another john on the street corner. When he returns he’s deep in thought, committed to his work. As he sits at his computer, she tries to distract him and he tells her she’s “too demanding.” The phone rings and he jumps for it, but she grabs it first and tosses it across the room. He flips out on her, “What the hell are you doing?!?” Mitchell’s a big guy and it’s a scary moment, even though logic seems to dictate that he’s far too cultured to do her any physical harm. “So this is how it’s going to be, huh?” He storms out, and we cut to the flat in London and Belle standing with her bags, having returned from the trip alone. She calls one of the Diamond women and finds out that Mitchell has women just like Belle all over the world. Suddenly, being a courtesan doesn’t seem very special anymore. It would appear that Belle enjoys her work so much that she has absolutely no idea what to do with herself when she’s not working (which was also the point of Episode 6). Even a cool flat and wads of cash leave her bored if she’s not busy fucking. I guess that’s it for Belle. She genuinely enjoys the fuck. Everything else is just gravy.

As is to be expected, she places a late night call to Ben and he comes over. When his fiancé Vanessa calls, Hannah asks loudly from across the room if he’d like a drink. When he gets off the phone he rips her a new one and accuses her of having abandoned everyone in her life “for this.” He says that at his wedding, she’s going to get up and give her Best Man speech, and everyone’s going to wonder, “Why isn’t he marrying her?” And then there’s silence between the two. It is a good question after all. The next morning Mitchell comes to the flat and calls out for Belle – only to find a note that says, “Sorry Mitch. It’s not for me.” Back at Hannah’s old place, she’s setting up a new website with Ben, as an “Independent Escort.” Ben jokes that he can be her muscle, and she wonders if Vanessa would have a problem with that. He confesses that he broke off the engagement – after all, if he doesn’t want to marry Hannah, he doesn’t want to marry anyone. The season ends with a fairly goopy monologue from Hannah about how as long as one person knows and loves you in London, it’s the best place in the world.

Well, not the greatest season finale ever, but certainly a decent enough setup for a second season that’s more about Hannah and Ben – but I’ll be damned if I’m even willing to take a guess at what that will entail. All in all, the first season of this show felt like it was skimming the surface of a deep pond. The premise can be taken in a wide variety of directions and hopefully the powers that be will present a slightly more complex Season Two.

As Season One nears the finish line, Belle/Hannah (Billie Piper) takes a big step with Ben (Iddo Goldberg) – or perhaps it’s the other way around. In any case, their relationship isn’t going to be the same after this week. It begins quickly and with almost no setup. The two friends walk down the street with Ben begging to join Belle in a foursome. She of course says no. Her clients are a married couple and she’s short one man. Ben insists he’s the man for the job, but Hannah just doesn’t see it. She claims he doesn’t know how to have sex “professionally.” After she scours various websites and is unable to come up with a suitable partner, she decides to give Ben a chance – despite the fact he’s getting married soon. After all, he claims he’s “always been good at separating emotion from sex.”

After Belle gives Ben a few pointers – as well as a little blue pill – the couple arrive. Kate (Heather Bleasdale) and Liam (Jonathan Phillips) have been married for fifteen years and they’ve been together twenty. The plan is for a straight swap…and maybe a little lesbian action as well. (Forgive the urban slang…at least I didn’t say lesbo or lezzie.) Good, clean fun to spice up their sex life and celebrate their union. But almost as soon as the foursome climb into bed, the couple is only interested in each other, much to Ben’s disappointment and our amazement; the shot of Liam casually pushing Belle aside to go jump on his wife is a great one, because Piper has never looked hotter in the series than she does in this scene. There’s a great montage sequence of the couple going at it while Hannah/Belle and Ben stare in amazement. The couple looks over and asks if their hosts are having fun. Sure! This leads to some minor kissing between our leads, and then Ben looks deeply into Hannah/Belle. In the ultimate scene showing the duality of her character, he calls her Hannah, and she tersely corrects him. “It’s Belle.” She becomes uncomfortable and pulls away, but it’s unclear why. There could be half a dozen reasons at this point.

The episode ends almost as casually as it began, with Hannah and Ben bidding adieu to the couple and then to each other. After everyone leaves, Hannah admits to the camera, “For me the hardest numbers have always been one plus one. I can never seem to make them add up.” It almost seems as if nothing has changed between the two, but the beauty of this episode was the mixture of the said and unsaid. As the final shot fades, you can clearly see that Hannah’s in deep thought, and that her friendship with Ben has changed, and hopefully for the better. For the first time in the series, Ben is not relegated to a couple brief scenes – he’s in every scene, save for the few brief shots of Belle trying to find a “fourth” at the beginning. Piper has been great since the word go, but due to his limited screentime, it’s been tough to get a grasp on Iddo Goldberg’s talents in this series. This material showed exactly why he was cast in this pivotal role, and he and Piper have amazing chemistry. The bulk of the story is interplay between the two. Some is fun, and some serious – but all of it’s great. It makes me really want to see a Season Two that delves much deeper into their complex relationship, instead of it just being the sordid-yet-palatable adventures of Belle. Far and away, this is the best episode of the season and it’s material that takes the show into a whole different arena. Next week, however, is the season finale. Can it possibly top this?

Belle/Hannah (Billie Piper) goes for a meeting with Stephanie (Cherie Lunghi) at a swank-looking restaurant, and notices some of the other girls are giggling at a laptop screen. Turns out Belle has been given a terrible online review by a client – a review that ends with “the word frigid comes to mind.” She laughs uncomfortably and says “Who listens to the critics anyway?” But then she nervously looks at the viewer, which seems to tell us something else. Sure enough, her business begins to suffer, which results in Stephanie sending her a rather odd client late one night.

At first Lewis (Kevin Doyle) seems fairly normal, but almost as soon as Belle closes the door, he begins acting strange. When she goes to make a usual business call to Stephanie, he becomes cold and demanding. It’s a very strange scene for this series, but realistically isn’t at all out of place. It almost looks as if things could get violent when Belle all but throws him out of her apartment. She’s left alone, shaken and confused. Who else can she turns to but buddy Ben (Iddo Goldberg)? He’s closing up the bar where he works when she shows up. He rambles on about his upcoming wedding to Vanessa and her insistence that the napkins should look like doves before even noticing that something might be wrong with Hannah. She tells him what just happened with the client and he, of course, becomes immediately overprotective. Stephanie calls and Hannah goes off on her, questioning why she would send her such a client. Turns out, he’s someone that another girl no longer wanted to deal with and she thought Belle could “handle it.” Belle accuses her of being nothing more than a pimp these days and hangs up. Then to the audience she says, “What a difference a year makes.”

Flashback to her first meeting with Stephanie. The woman asks her about her A-levels, and Hannah rattles off a list of her scholastic achievements, and Stephanie replies, “What I meant was, do you do anal?” Groan! What a godawful joke. Would anybody actually ask such a question using the phrase A-levels? Stephanie tells her, “I’m going to keep you safe. I’m going to be your best friend Hannah – a best friend who takes 40% and doesn’t tell you her real name.” Back in the here and now, Ben suggests that maybe she should take a break from her job – just for a while. In fact, he bets her that she won’t miss the job.

Apparently taking a break from being a whore means spending your days sitting on park benches watching “normal” people live their lives – as if Hannah never noticed what other people do before now. All the while some really goofy music plays in the background. Go figure. Of course, out of boredom she calls Ben for lunch – a repetitive moment that again exposes how few people Hannah has in her life on this show. Hopefully next season the show writes a few more characters into the mix. Anyway, Ben cannot meet her since he’s consumed with work and wedding planning. She decides to take the opportunity to go shopping for a wedding present and meets a clerk named Tim (Matt Smith). She takes a sort of liking to him and ends up bringing him back to her place and sleeping with him, and then he simply won’t go away. Hannah’s not used to people not going away. At one point he discovers her collection of oils and such in the bathroom, and deduces that she must be a masseuse. She awkwardly says that she doesn’t like telling people because most assume a masseuse is also a whore (a word she cannot bring herself to use…ha, ha.) Eventually Ben comes over claiming to be her fiancé and the guy quickly exits. The two friends converse and she insists that she won the bet. Being “normal” just isn’t her thing. He says that the least normal thing about her is her love for marmite(!). For the record, marmite, a yeast extract the Brits spread on toast, is actually pretty tasty.

Belle gets a call from Stephanie saying she’s once again in demand as someone wrote a sparkling review of her online. She tells the agent she’s ready to go back to work, but more or less threatens her business if she ever pulls anything like that again. (Could Belle ever really be a threat to Stephanie?) As the episode draws to a close, we see it was Ben who wrote the review for Belle, a scene that brings to the forefront the biggest problem with this episode: Why didn’t Belle just get online a write a new review (or even several) after the bad one? The answer is that we then wouldn’t have an episode, or at least we wouldn’t have this episode. Overall, this really seems to be the weakest entry thus far and it really doesn’t do much of anything other than further strengthen the friendship between Hannah and Ben, which could’ve been done dozens of other ways. The rest of it, Belle embracing her inner Hannah was really pretty weak, unless the goal was to show that there no longer is a Belle and a Hannah, but just one woman. Maybe that was the point, and maybe I missed it. (Or not, since I just mentioned it.) In any case, the tone was all over the place, going from dark and disturbing to light and airy. If someone tuned in to the show for the first time and saw this, they likely wouldn’t tune in again.

(This recap was very late. Apologies to regular readers, but the good thing about Showtime is that this series plays over and over throughout the week…and then there’s always Showtime On Demand. In fact, as I type there’s a “Call Girl” marathon going on on one of the Showtimes!)

The halfway point of “Call Girl’s” first season sees the concept stretching its wings even further, while also providing viewers with what is allegedly the ultimate straight man fantasy: A threesome with two incredibly hot, wanting women seemingly willing to do just about anything. Hannah (Billie Piper) tells viewers in the precredits sequence, “It’s not that I don’t like going down on girls, it’s just that I never really enjoy going out with ‘em.” Before the episode is over, she’ll do both.

The installment begins with Hannah in a bridal shop trying on a wedding dress. Why? Is this some kink dress up thing for a client? She receives a call from Stephanie (Cherie Lunghi) asking her if she’d be game for a threesome. She doesn’t rule it out, but wants to know who the client is. It’s Ashok (Ace Bhatti), last seen in the third episode, and Belle’s regular. She seems immediately put off. Why after all this time does Ash want two women instead of just Belle? Why didn’t he ask her about it first? She takes the job, but does so more out of curiosity than anything else. There’s no way she’s going to let two strangers get their lascivious paws all over her beloved, trustworthy Ash.

Then we find out why she’s in the shop in the first place. She’s there shopping with Ben (Iddo Goldberg) for his wedding tux. The shop assistant mistakes Hannah for Ben’s bride to be, and he indignantly points out that she’s not his bride, she’s “just here to help out.” They haven’t yet spoken about the e-mail she sent him in last week’s episode – the one that gave the address to her website. But apparently it’s not such a huge a deal to Ben that they go out shopping. Afterwards they go out for a drink and the ice is finally broken. His biggest question – which also answers something we’ve been asking ourselves since the series began – is, “Were you doing it when we were still seeing each other?” Hannah answers no. So Hannah and Ben were an item once upon a time! Perhaps not a huge revelation, but it does explain quite a bit about their friendship, as well as beg for further exploration. He presses her further, “Why do you do it?” She replies, “Would you believe me if I said I enjoyed it?” He asks what she’s doing tonight and she tells him of the threesome and Ashok and that “he’s lovely and he’s my oldest client – he’s like a friend.”

We then get a brief flashback showing how Belle got into the biz. It was almost like an accident. She met a man and went home with him for the night. The next morning her gives her cab fare to get home, but when she looked at the amount, it was well over what a cab ride would cost. Thus began her journey. Back in the present, Belle goes to the hotel room to meet Naomi (Beth Cordingly), her partner for the night. They prepare for Ash’s arrival and when Naomi asks what Ash is like, Belle gives a vaguely romantic sort of reply about the man, to which Naomi replies, “What I meant was is he into vanilla or anal?” Once he arrives there’s an extensive montage of the three of them in all sorts of positions and situations throughout the evening, and it’s really sexy stuff and shows more skin than I think has been shown thus far on the show. Afterwards, the trio lounge in bed and Ash thanks Belle for the book he recently gave her, and admits it really moved him.

After he leaves, Belle awkwardly asks Naomi if she’d like to hang out some time as friends. She agrees, which leads to the real meat of the story. They become fast friends, going out for Chinese and comparing work stories. They’ve got a lot in common, clearly, and they can talk about stuff back and forth that they can’t speak about with anyone else. One afternoon Belle gets a call from Stephanie asking if she’s got room for a new client on Wednesday. But Wednesday is Ashok’s day? “He’s with Naomi this week.” Boom! Not what she wanted to hear. She’s not interested in the new client, and she feels betrayed by her new friend, although it’s been clear since the beginning that Naomi’s approach to business is a little more businesslike than Belle’s. She’s crushed, and tells the viewer, “The end of the affair was written from the beginning. He’s a man who pays women for sex. I’m the whore. At some point his tastes were bound to change.” She then deletes Naomi’s info from her cell phone. It’s really a very sad scene, and shows how much we’ve come to care for Belle/Hannah in a short amount of time. In reality, we probably wouldn’t have sympathy for such a situation, but this isn’t reality, it’s TV.

She, of course, turns to the only friend she’s got, Ben. He comes to her place and they make some amends. He admits that much of his problem stems from her work being such a huge part of her life that he just didn’t know about. He says, “You’re the only girl I’ve shagged who still likes me.” She replies, “Except Vanessa.” The episode ends with Ben asking Hannah to be his best man. Really this was an episode about friendship and what exactly cements that institution, with the point being an understanding of the friends involved in the relationship. Ben understands Hannah and vice versa. Hannah and Naomi didn’t understand one another, of course they never really had a chance. Ben and Hannah continue giving each other chances, despite the fumbles.