ENDA BOWE/HULU; HULUALAN SEPINWALL
Rooney and Alice Birch from
Rooney’s bestselling novel
— director Lenny Abraham-
son (Room) simply lingers
on those faces. He trusts his
actors’ expressions to tell us
what we need to know about
why Marianne and Connell
fall in love — and, almost just
as often, out of it.
The second thing you
notice is their breathing.
When they first hook up as
teenagers in a small Irish
town, she is a virgin and he
is not, but they are almost
immediately in sync as sexual
partners. You can tell this as
much by the sounds of their
breaths rising and falling,
growing faster and slower, as
you can from the way their
bodies move or the flush on
their cheeks. Love scenes on
film more often than not feel
perfunctory, no matter how
attractive the actors and howT
HE FIRST thing you
notice about Marianne
(Daisy Edgar-Jones)
and Connell (Paul Mescal) are
their faces. They are young,
relatively innocent faces,
wide open to us but hidden
from their schoolmates. They
only light up when they’re
looking at each other, as
if trading glances is how
they get through the day.
Again and again throughout
Normal People — an excellent
miniseries adapted by Sallyacrobatic the positions. But
the ones here feel genuinely
sexy, which is a crucial step to
explaining the bond between
Marianne and Connell. They
fit together beautifully in
many other ways — at least,
when their respective demons
aren’t keeping them at odds
— but it’s when they’re in bed
together that the match is the
most obviously right.Normal People
NETWORK Hulu
AIR DATE April 29th
STARRING
Daisy Edgar-Jones
Paul Mescal
Sarah Greene
Fionn O’Shea
Eliot Salt
$gives them a chance to get
closer, and to find something
good together — until it isn’t.
Later, when they both wind
up at Trinity College in Dub-
lin, the roles have reversed,
with her the social butterfly
and him the brilliant loner.
They drift in and out of each
other’s lives, sometimes in
big dramatic ways, sometimes
when one or both just isn’t
paying attention. He is peri-
odically awful to her without
meaning to be, while she has
a tendency to pull away for
reasons beyond her control.
Yet they share not only an
intense sexual chemistry, but
also a weakness for living too
much inside their own heads.
Connell spends much of their
early romance desperate to
keep it a secret from his judg-
mental friends; later, he finds
out they knew all along, and
“no one even cared.”
This is delicate, extremely
interior material, at times told
in leisurely sequences where
we simply watch one or both
of them lost in thought, at
others in quick, impressionis-
tic bursts conveying the rush
of feeling brought on by the
latest complication between
them. Of the show’s two
young stars, much is asked,
and even more is given. They
are spectacular, apart but
especially together, at con-
veying the vulnerability and
longing essential to making a
love story like this work.
Things get messy for both
along the way. She explores
S&M (in a way that feels
psychologically honest rather
than exploitive), and he
struggles with depression.
But there are moments — a
bike ride through the Italian
countryside during a school
holiday, an all-night Skype
call when one badly needs to
feel near to the other, and, es-
pecially, an important decla-
ration made in a car on a dark
and painful night — when
they, and Normal People,
couldn’t be more perfect.
Because the most import-
ant thing you notice about
Marianne and Connell, thanks
to the artistry and care with
which their story is told, is
how badly you want things to
work out for them — for their
deep, complicated, but un-
mistakably real love to win.The story follows the
pair from secondary school
through college, with each
30-minute episode checking
in on them at a different stage
of their ever-evolving relation-
ship. As we first meet them,
she’s the school outcast,
and he’s a popular jock. But
his mother, Lorraine (Sarah
Greene), cleans Marianne’s
palatial family home, whichMescal
and
GreeneNO ORDINARY LOVE
Hulu’s ‘Normal People,’ an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s
acclaimed novel, presents a millennial romance for the agesTV
Edgar-Jones
and Mescal
are students
navigating
intimacy.88 | Rolling Stone +++++Classic |^ ++++Excellent |^ +++Good |^ ++Fair |^ +Poor