Located in the most northern territory of Canada among the Aboriginal Inuit, “North of North”, in first Thursday on Netflix, is a charming comedy of small town, with – as it is so often the case in small town comedies – a generous part of Rom -Com.
From the first episode, given its luminous tone – it is the Arctic of long sunny days rather than endless dark nights – we feel that the long arc will be predictable in the way you want, but quite unpredictable in the short term to keep things interesting. Great feelings, turbulence and dilemmas that change life abound, but above all the spectacle wants to make its people, and you, happy.
We are in Ice Cove – “Think about the most distant place in the North that you have never been, continue now,” explain our heroine, Siaja (Anna Lambe), 26 Cooper), now a 7 -year -old hyperkinetic child, and after years to come third in her life, “I put myself first.” We are just given enough reasons not to love Ting, or at least to understand why Siaja has surpassed it and to understand that, in this narrative arrangement, it is toast. (She: “I have been inside for a long time and you have never noticed it.” Him: “You really think you can do better than me?” – What, of course, the implicit answer is yes.) But she admits that he is a good father.
Siaja also works in the shadow of her mother, Neevee (Maika Harper), an alcoholic and former recovered child, whom a citizen calls “slut”, “shameless” and without God, but the friend of Siaja Colin (Bailey Poching) – Maori, Gay – considers a “legend”. Neevee, which manages a general store, is hard but friendly, and an excellent fun grandmother to hunt. (“Do you want to help me sort the balls?” She asks.)
Like its protagonists, Ice Cove struggles; It is the poorer cousin of a better-on-road community (think of Pawnee vis-à-vis Eagleton in “Parks & Recreation”) with which he is in competition to become the site of a new “polar research center”. This brings the Alistair scene (Jay Ryan), a white “southerner” of Ottawa, on a contract to assess the aptitude of the location, and his Kuuk assistant (Braeden Clarke), obviously shaped as a new romantic interest for Siaja, who broke with Ting. (“Is he single now?” Single women from Ice Cove want to know.)
“I have the impression that we are all a little hungry for the connection, you know,” she said to Kuuk at their first meeting during a spring festival – she circulated a petition to extend the festival to “cultural programming” all year round – and we see from his face which, yes, he is a bit suffocated for the connection himself. Less easy to see is that OSTAIR, robustly beautiful in a way common to the comedies of the North, will prove to be the Father that Siaja has never met, and beyond knowing that she must have one, did not know anything. (There is a comic reverse Oedipus during their first meeting – briefly Icky, but treated in a mature way.) His return to a place where he would promise that he would never come back means that he and Neeve have things to say – the thread of the Rom -Comd -Com, not to avoid talking about them.
After a job of a day carrying large objects in the discharge and an underwater vision of the goddess of the sea Nuliajuk (Tanya Tagaq), Siaja becomes an executive assistant of the director of the work city, Helen, (a wonderful Mary Lynn Rajskub), is not aware that Helen flows through assistants like I cross the similar. A Gai Credit Grabber, Helen identifies with the community and as a manager of the North, in a comic manner, since she is white – although in some respects, she is closer to this one than Siaja, who speaks Inuktitut with difficulty and, apart from eccentric friends, Colin and Millie with purple leaves (Zorga Qaanaq), may seem a foreigner in his own native city.
“Thank you, but only the whites can get drunk at work,” said Siaja when Helen suggests champagne to celebrate her hiring.
“I love you feeling safe enough to make white jokes around me,” said Helen.
In addition to the evolution of love and family stuff, while Siaja, Neevee, Kuuk, Alistair and Ting get along like Tampeants, it is a series as episodic as, for example, “Northern Exhibition”. During the eight episodes of the season, there are parties, research, dance, alcohol, random sex (meet the term “eskihumper”), a kind of baseball and a fire in the dumping ground that the inhabitants assist as a pop concert.
With Shining Star Lambe (previously seen in “True Detective: Night Country”), the creators Stacey Aglok Macdonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, are from Nunavut, the territory where “North of North” is settled. (That Susan CoyneSince “Elite and arrows, “ is an executive and writer, is a bonus, for credit reading fans of this show.) Produced jointly with the CBC and the Aboriginal television networkHe brings a comparison with “Reservation dogs“As a multigenerational comedy among indigenous peoples, filmed in the right place evocative and made by people who know the neighborhood.
“I see life and beauty everywhere,” explains Siaja, who has never been employed, to express her qualifications for one. The slightest pleasure of the “North of the North” is not to see the world through his eyes.
