‘LADY’ IN LUST
Natalie Portman’s ‘Lady in the Lake’ delivers crime drama with a twist of sultry romance
Apple TV+’s “Lady in the Lake” is a searing crime drama, full of disturbing revelations and surreal dips into the nightmarish world of our dreams. It’s a show about the brutal murders of a young Jewish girl, Tessie Durst (Bianca Bell), and a Black woman, Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), and the horrible way in which 1969 Baltimore decided one death mattered more than the other. “Lady in the Lake” is a tricky, grim, ambitious affair, but there’s one sweetly sexy storyline that is buoying the show up.
Newly single Maddie Morgenstern (Natalie Portman) — having dropped her married name of Schwartz — continues to enjoy her affair with handsome police officer Ferdie Platt (Y’Lan Noel) in “Lady in the Lake” Episode 3. The two first hooked up in Episode 2, when Ferdie checked up on a (drunk and high) Maddie after her staged apartment robbery. She invites him in for a beer and the two have heady sex...all while poor Cleo Johnson finds herself embroiled in an assassination attempt gone wrong across town.
What could have simply been a one night stand begins to blossom into something more in “Lady in the Lake” Episode 3. Halfway through the episode, while Cleo gets drunk in desperation, we see Ferdie climb the fire escape to Maddie’s apartment. He slips in through her window and begins taking off his hat, jacket and shirt. Maddie, clad only in a slip in her bathroom, looks back at him and asks in a breathy voice: “Have I done something wrong, officer?”
Maddie links her hands behind her back, as if to allow them to be cuffed. Wordlessly, Ferdie goes to her, lifts up her slip and takes her at the bathroom sink.
It’s not simply a steamy sequence on its own — punctuated by the tragic vision of Cleo crashing down from her own frantic high — but it’s starkly different from what “Lady in the Lake” creator, writer, and director Alma Ha’rel has shown us of Maddie’s marriage bed with ex-husband Milton Schwartz (Brett Gelman). With Milton, Maddie lays passively while her husband gets off. With Ferdie, Maddie is climaxing in tandem with the dashing policeman.
“Well, I think Maddie is clearly very frustrated in her relationship with Milton,” “Lady in the Lake” star and executive producer Natalie Portman told Decider. “And her relationship with Ferdie offers a completely new way of relating to another human: Someone who sees her, who she enjoys.”
Portman also explained that over the course of “Lady in the Lake”, we’ll see Maddie’s connection with Ferdie grow. It was something that Ha’rel wanted to explore as the series goes on.
“Alma was talking about how to, you know, kind of chart the growth, where initially it’s not love. It’s just kind of this very physical reaction to each other that they have and they slowly get to know each other,” Portman said. “She wanted the nature of the love scenes to change from the beginning, which is like purely physical to later, where they’re really connected.”
Connection is something that Maddie certainly needs at this point in “Lady in the Lake”. She’s apart from her Jewish friends and family, rejected by her son Seth (Noah Jupe), and trying to foster the career of her dreams in journalism. In fact, “Lady in the Lake” Episode 3’s title, “I was the first to see her dead. You were the last to see her alive,” is about a wholly different connection Maddie is trying to make —with Tessie Durst’s alleged killer Stephen Zawadzkie (Dylan Arnold).
But certainly the most entertaining connection being fostered is between Maddie and Ferdie.