Keeping your personal and professional lives separate is a tricky business, even if you have an ordinary job and a conventional family. If you’re a transsexual living with the children of a dead girlfriend and you earn a living by murdering people, it’s almost impossible – particularly when your gangster boss rocks up unexpectedly for a bit of rarefied country air and the owner of your new home is planning to sell it because you handed his ass to him.
Yup, thing’s are tough for Mia (Chloë Sevigny) – the most likeable professional assassin since Francisco Scaramanga.
Mia isn’t the only one in the household with problems, of course. Riley (Karla Crome) is very clearly up the duff – presumably as a result of her inexplicable and seemingly joyless affair with Farmer Bastardleymow, John (Vincent Regan). Her brother Levi (Reece Noi) is grudgingly getting used to the idea of having Mia around, but he’s still struggling with the idea that he’s been usurped as man of the house by – in his words – ‘a cock in a frock’. Even little Leoni (Roma Christensen) has a minor pickle at her dance class: nobody to boogie with. ‘I can’t dance, miss,’ she lies to the simpering instructress. ‘I’ve got breath cancer.’ However, the most troubled of all the residents is Ryan (Jorden Bennie).
After being spied on by a mysterious Frank Gallagher lookalike as he picks grass on the moors, he finds Mia playing submarines in the bath with her periscope up – and things get worse from there. Bewildered by Mia’s sexual identity, he starts to question his own and drags up for the impromptu party held to celebrate Eddie’s (Peter Wight) decision to covertly buy the leasehold on the farmhouse.
Levi and his mate cruelly cackle at the sight and poor Ryan runs off to his room, crying. Mia does her best to explain that while she’s always known she was a woman, her son is a boy who will grow up to be a man. It’s one of several poignant moments in this episode – another of which comes when Eddie says, ‘I’ve always wanted a place in the country.’ The look that flashes across her face as she realises her work and home lives are colliding is a masterwork of subtly repressed emotion.
However, the most memorable scene is also the most disconcerting. After an emotional Levi lashes out at her (‘Fuck off, you freak… weirdo!’), Mia returns to the desolate warehouse that used to be her home and polishes off some rosé. Then she puts on a priapic rubber Pinocchio nose and stands in front of the mirror in the buff, punching herself in the cock and crying, ‘I don’t want to be a boy.’
It’s frightening to see such a dispassionate killer lose control in such a way, but Sevigny’s performance is so superb you’re scared for Mia, not of her. It’s certainly enough to render the traces of Wobbling Accent Syndrome that appear when she announces she’s signing the adoption papers totally forgivable.
If Mia’s only predicaments were a momentary intonation malfunction and the metaphor writ large of a fox in the farm’s henhouse, she’d be jigging through Hit & Miss with the carefree abandon she shows when Frank Wilson’s ‘Do I Love You?’ comes on the stereo.
Unfortunately, it isn’t even just her gender, her family and her criminal career that she has to worry about. To complicate things yet further, she’s fallen for buff barman Ben (Jonas Armstrong); and as he doesn’t know the truth about what she keeps in her knickers, their forthcoming date appears doomed to end in more misery. It’s rough on Mia, who we’re rooting for all the way, but it’s yet another layer of intrigue in this compulsive, affecting thriller. Roll on Episode 3.
Aired at 10pm on Tuesday 29th May 2012 on Sky Atlantic.
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