An Incredibly Horny New Show Where the Men Are the Sex Toys
The Starz series “Little Birds” stars Juno Temple as a spoiled-little-rich-girl in the 1950s who’s yearning to break free. And break free she does.
Proof that fiction need not be explicit to be sexy, Little Birds is just about the most eroticized thing to hit American TV in years. Exuding sweaty desire in every one of its Vaseline-smeary, boldly colorful, canted-angle compositions, Sophia Al-Maria’s Starz series (premiering June 6, following its 2020 British debut) never met a scenario or an actor it didn’t want to sexualize, turning everything and everyone in this six-part affair into an object of intense lust and longing. It’s hard to imagine the show being more hungry for the taste and feel of human flesh, and the euphoric release that comes from indulging one’s deepest appetites, and thus its primary failing is that, after setting that fevered pitch early, it can’t maintain it all the way through to its climax.
Based on a collection of posthumously published 1979 short stories by Anaïs Nin, Al-Maria’s tale concerns Lucy Savage (Juno Temple), a spoiled little daddy’s girl living in 1955 Manhattan with her weapons-manufacturing arms-dealer father Grant (Billions’s David Costabile) and her snooty, subservient mother Vanessa (Amy Landecker). Like her mom, Lucy is destined to become—per the show’s oft-underlined title metaphor—a caged bird, betrothed to Lord Hugo Cavendish-Smyth (Hugh Skinner) in Tangier, a decadent outpost where Hugo will be tasked with helping Grant secure a foothold in the country’s guns-and-ammo market. An introductory scene of Lucy dancing around her eye-popping bedroom listening to a singer croon, “I want to go to the devil, I want to be evil,” underlines that the young bride-to-be is a wild child just waiting to be set free. Nonetheless, she embraces her marital prison enthusiastically, which is not quite how Hugo himself handles it, given that he’s gay and currently involved in a heated affair with Egyptian playboy prince Adham Abaza (Raphael Acloque), who naturally doesn’t like the idea of his lover entering into a sham union with a woman.
It doesn’t take long upon her journey for Lucy to befriend singer Lili von X (Nina Sosanya) and Countess Mandrax (Rossy de Palma)—two women whose lives are all about uninhibited artistic and carnal expression—and to wind up in Lily’s art-porn film, being fondled and devoured by a gaggle of glittery, scantily-dressed men and women. Once in her new environs, Lucy also comes into contact with Cherifa (Yumna Marwan), a local prostitute whose main calling card is providing dominatrix services to her male and female clients, including the right-hand man of Secretary Pierre Vaney (Jean-Marc Barr), a cheerily smiling villain who’s trying to solidify French authority over the country at the very moment that a nationalist movement is sweeping the Moroccan king back into power. Cherifa loves Leo (Kamel Labroudi), but she quickly catches the eye of the Secretary, just as Leo himself becomes employed (i.e. enslaved) by the Countess, who—along with two randy housemates—treat him like a veritable sex toy.
Little Birds is rife with tensions between freedom and imprisonment (in marriage and society, for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike), abandon and repression, female liberation and misogynistic denigration and subjugation, and independence and paternalistic control—the last of which comes via the dynamic shared by Lucy and Grant, and Cherifa and the Secretary, and extends to the larger issue of France’s colonial relationship with Morocco. There’s nary a moment in Al-Maria’s series when such concerns aren’t front-and-center, and yet they’re handled with electric playfulness, such that every conversation, every gesture, every tryst is juiced with live-wire excitement. The material practically throbs with pent-up explosiveness, and that atmosphere doesn’t diminish even when its characters get some satisfaction—be it through traditional sex or, as with one of Cherifa’s clients, urine-drenched kinkiness.
With America and Tangier cast as the be-who-you-want-to-be counterweights to French hegemony, personal and political quests for sovereignty are consistently at the forefront of Little Birds’ action, which in its early going plays like a candy-coated saga of unquenchable horniness. From Lucy firing her daddy’s pistol at a cigarette perched between the Secretary’s lips, to Leo pouring water into a bowl with a crotch-level hose that his two female admirers lap at like they’re in a 20th century porno, the show feels desperate to gets its rocks off. Save for a couple of brief scenes, however, it sets this tone without resorting to any nudity, much less X-rated encounters. It’s a model of creating a heightened mood through attitude and aesthetics, its brilliantly bold color palette, suggestive framing, and ravenous performances doing more to eroticize the material than any straightforward sex scenes might.
Unfortunately, Little Birds doesn’t have the stamina to sustain that energy. By its midpoint, the series’ sensuality flags, replaced by more straightforward dramatic dilemmas and espionage machinations that lack the preceding passages’ oomph. Lucy and Cherifa’s parallel attempts to get out from underneath their literal/surrogate fathers’ thumbs are in keeping with the proceedings’ overarching themes, but it’s hard not to miss the mischievous friskiness of the opening episodes. From its formal construction to its performances, led by Temple with a twinkle in her eye that belies her formidable ferociousness, the entire endeavor is about unruly excess triumphing over conservative, constricting conformity. Yet the more it proceeds down its chosen path, the less it sizzles with freewheeling naughtiness.
Without that spark, Little Birds’ exaggerated performances come off as more and more out of place, as if they’d been transported in from another project (in particular, Costabile’s over-the-top American munitions cretin). Al-Maria knows what she wants to say but, in the end, has not quite as confident a grasp on what makes her storytelling thrive, so that by its conclusion, the series transforms into a more serious-minded—and narrowly-focused—tale about individuals striving to break free from the figurative chains that bind them. Temple and Marwan do much to prevent things from becoming a slog; the latter exudes a don’t-tread-on-me sexual fury that makes up for the bumpiness of her character’s trajectory. But the careful balance of frivolity and gravity that initially defines Little Birds finally gives way to a far less pleasurable air of garish hysteria that doesn’t serve any of its characters particularly well. Losing sight of what made it so fun in the first place, it concludes with a bang that feels a lot like a whimper.