Editor’s Picks: Netflix’s ‘The Perfect Couple’ Is Delightfully Frivolous

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

The Perfect Couple (2024)

Despite the murder at the core of this Netflix show, there’s something delightfully frivolous about The Perfect Couple. As Nicole Kidman serves blackberry mojitos, Isabelle Adjani – one of France’s most celebrated actresses – slinks about in a feather-trimmed dress, delivering the most over-the-top performance of her career. The series feels like a throwback to old adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries, like the campy Elizabeth Taylor vehicle The Mirror Crack’d (1980) or the over-acted, Lauren-Bacall-starring Murder on the Orient Express (1974) – films which weren’t afraid to inject humour into crime fiction. This tongue-in-cheek approach gives The Perfect Couple many of its standout moments, which often seem engineered to go viral on social media – a dynamic the series plays with, as guests at a particularly calamitous book launch pull out their phones to record the unfolding drama. Really, though, it’s worth watching the whole thing just for the illogical nugget of joy that opens each episode: a group dance number to Meghan Trainor’s ‘Criminal’ (2024), which serves as its opening credits. There’s a lot of manic finger-pointing in the dance moves, and a lot of dramatic hair flipping too; it sets the tone for a show which – mercifully – doesn’t take itself too seriously. 

Nat Raha, apparitions (nines) (2024)

Last November, I hosted a poetry reading featuring Nat Raha; towards the end of the night,  the Bluetooth microphones malfunctioned, and began to pick up audio from a nearby pub. The whole thing was both embarrassing and spectral, a cacophony of absent voices masking all speech in the room itself. Reading Raha’s latest book, apparitions (nines), is not entirely dissimilar: disjointed, at times perplexing, yet enjoyable in its own slightly bizarre – even masochistic – way. The poems often feel a bit like zoning out of a conversation, snippets of language washing over you without their underlying logic ever becoming evident: one poem opens: ‘of the possible is their droplet / eyes, climatic quits to feed / sheer shoulders polyester’. Amidst this landscape of linguistic overload are brief, glinting pockets of clarity, where incisive political imagining, startling imagery, and even occasional levity shine through the chaos - sometimes all at once, as when Raha writes, ‘at trial: yur crimes of invention / in my charred gold minidress’. These poems are eccentric in the most literal sense, Raha’s writing pushing at the edges of the mainstream of poetry, presenting a punk, transfeminist revision of poetic norms. It may be a tricky affair, but apparitions (nines) deserves to be read – for its insights and newness, and the studs of pleasure it doles out. 

The Harlem Gospel Travelers, Rhapsody (2024)

I’ve spent the past few weeks reciting sonnets by poet-preacher John Donne – reading them to friends, to lovers, or alone in bed. My go-to, transformed into a kind of unimpressive party piece, is ‘Holy Sonnet XIV’ (c.1609), in which Donne begs a dominant, sadistic God to slap him about (‘bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new’). At around the same time this habit formed, I started listening to The Harlem Gospel Travelers, enjoying their equally playful way of singing about God: pop-inflected and never religiose, their songs can be casually enjoyed, sitting comfortably on my commute playlist between Chappell Roan and Donna Summer. Their latest album, Rhapsody, opens with the song ‘We Don’t Love Enough’, a credo evident across their work. Brazen queerness, too, is reflected in their ornate musical style and lush performances. I understand very little about the technical side of music, which is one of the reasons I enjoy it so much, surrendering myself to the fundamental, sensual pleasure of a good song – and there’s something particularly sensual to the way the trio’s voices merge on this new album, their harmonies always sounding a little dissonant, perfectly out of step. 

Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) is available from Nightboat Press. The Harlem Gospel Travelers’ Rhapsody is out now from Colemine Records

^{Main image: The Perfect Couple, 2024, production still. Courtesy and photograph: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Netflix}