Conversations With Friends review: 'Is the penis just not absurd?'
Alison Oliver and Joe Alwyn in episode 7 of Conversations With Friends, on RTÉ One.
Call me old-fashioned but I prefer sexy blondy married philanderers to stick to the Cheater's Guide To Riding A Young One. And rule number one, Mr Nick Conway, is don’t let the wife find out.
Up until now, Nick has seemed trés blasé about Melissa discovering the affair. Kissing Frances at his wife’s birthday party, copulating in their house (does anyone come home early in Monkstown?), and having the bit of raunch in the holiday home... not a bother to him.
When he finds out Bobbi — his wife’s new bestie — knows about his dillydallying, you’d think he’d have the decency to look nervous and stick a finger into the collar of his organic cotton tee and try to loosen it a bit.
But no, this guy suggests to his young lover that he tell his wife all about it, because he doesn’t like lying to her. Frances, more for herself than anyone else says, “You don’t want to leave her though”, and asks “What if she tells you to stop seeing me?”
Oh, Christ. It’s like watching someone scoop out their own still-beating bloody heart and hold it aloft for the seagulls to devour. “It’s a risk,” admits Nick, as if he’s contemplating changing from a fixed-rate mortgage to a tracker, “But, I mean, all of this is already a risk.”
Meanwhile, Frances has started inviting him to her place, she answers the door, and he stands there doing a duck face, to show off his cheekbones, and she says, (oh God, I’m going puce typing this, I’m morto for her), “You looking f**king good.”
But she says it like she says everything else so although it was perhaps meant to come off as self-assured sex-pot, she sounds more like she has a Werther’s Original stuck in her epiglottis and she’s trying to gently dislodge it.
What else happens? Bobbi moves in, Frances tries to steal Nick’s coat — it’s the least he could do if you ask me, but he must really love that jacket cos he tells her twice she’s not getting it. Cripes, after all you've done with her, you cad, the least you could do is let her wear the cool threads.
We also see Melissa's book launch, where Frances has to watch Nick drape his arm around her. She says to Bobbi, “They look good together, don't they? They look right.”
No offence Frances, but maybe if you didn’t dress like the wife from Grant Wood’s painting, you might feel better.
Frances joins Tinder, sleeps with the date, who is hilariously Nick-esque in the looks department, just younger and chattier and, you know, wife-free. She is such a wagon to him, sneering about the poets he likes (there’s nothing wrong with digging Yeats and Heaney, Frances you snobbo) that I’m half surprised he’s game when she invites herself back to his place. Then she tells Nick about it and he’s all odd as two left feet even though, you know, HE’S MARRIED.
This fight culminates in Frances telling him, “The problem is that I’m in love with you and you obviously don't feel the same.” Pause for him to deny it, which he doesn’t, so she says “F**k you.” Alas, dear Frances, I have the feeling he won’t be doing that anymore.
“What's it like having sex with a man? Is the penis just not absurd? It's just a device with no aesthetic relation to anything?” Frances replies, “That's kind-of its charm.”
Frances tells Nick, "You're not camp, you're aggressively heterosexual, you even have a mistress.”
So awks, I nearly got the gawks. Melissa telling Frances that she hasn’t seen Nick so relaxed in a long time. That’s what multiple orgasms with an undergrad will do for ya.
