Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade

Author:Richard Ayoade [Richard Ayoade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571339150
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR:

THE LIFE OF SKY

A View Under Weston’s Wing

Donna can’t believe it.

Sally Weston is going to be her personal mentor.

Sally. Weston.

And what’s more, Sally Weston is inviting a select group of candidates to her really big house.

And further to that, we then cut to an exterior shot of this really big house.

And in case we’re still unsure of how really big this house is after the shot of the candidates entering its really big hall, one of the candidates says, ‘This is a really big house.’

The mise en scène is impeccable. Barreto’s camera joins Weston as she stands at the top of a double staircase. She looks down on our would-be flight attendants, her view (literally) from the top, while the song ‘Up, Up and Away’ by the 5th Dimension subtextually thwacks any nails not yet hit squarely on their heads by the audible gasps.

In the following dining-room scene, which operates as an exponential multiplier of both exposition and eyelines, we are able to hear about how Sally reached her vaulted position. She met her handsome husband, Jack Weston (Chad Everett), in first class. He asked for a surfeit of warm nuts, and she realised that what he wanted wasn’t safe to put in a microwave. His face blending seamlessly with his fitted leather jacket, Jack looks like he’d rather be wrestling a steer than interact with Randy Jones (Joshua Malina), the crew’s comic relief. When Randy asks to be treated as just one of the girls, Jack’s eyes visibly dim. It’s a fun moment and taps into the truth of how uncomfortable it is to be suddenly confronted, in one’s own home, with an insistent homosexual. What must make it even more galling is that Jack built this home himself, using hands that are as adept at felling a log as cupping the breast of a new secretary; hands that have touched no penis other than his own, and only then to uncork a jet of steaming piss or to purposively guide his gift into a Playmate of the Year’s glistening cove.

It’s a shame we don’t get to see more of Jack and his barely contained disgust. This scene is his swansong. What we see more of, though, is the connection between (Sally) Weston and Jensen. Even though Weston and Jensen sounds like the diffusion line of a gun range, these two are a class act, linked by their glossy manes, nostalgia for the lost magic of air travel, a mania for handing out tiny meals at altitude, and Barreto’s matching slow zooms.

In a way that could be creepy in less assured hands than Candice Bergen’s, Sally surprises Donna as the latter walks out of the former’s animal-print-lined bathroom. Donna has just been admiring a collection of red and green aeroplane-shaped soaps and is understandably overwhelmed. Sally takes Donna to look at her walk-in wardrobe. Donna can’t believe that one person could own all of these clothes. My thoughts turn, as I’m sure do yours, to moth management. Sometimes

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