Jade pinner how to#

She also excels at dung throwing, crushing the competition and vaulting toward first place, which comes with the prize of a standing fan. The Harvest Festival is stitched together with food and games - target practice, balancing pails of water, carnival-like challenges made to trick the player, which Villanelle wins handily to the chagrin of the booth owner. We get a sense of how her mother is mean at the Harvest Festival that gathers together nearby towns, although directorial choices obfuscate the gravity of her cruelty, making it hard to make sense of Villanelle’s perspective at times. Where this episode fails is properly unpacking statements such as this. Villanelle: “You really don’t remember dad?” Villanelle, like the devil on his shoulder, suggests he just beat up people. Consider the exchange between Pyotr and Villanelle when she happens upon him beating the hell out of a stray couch, which he tells her he does so he doesn’t beat up people. But there’s something frustratingly basic about the psychology underlying this episode. She can’t reckon with who her father really was, only make him into a golden-hued figure who can do no wrong, even as the episode’s closing argument suggests he was worried Villanelle would do something to the family. She’s not only the person Villanelle holds responsible for putting her in the orphanage, she’s all Villanelle has left. It’s understandable why she reserves her ire for her mother.

Villanelle clearly carries two primary familial wounds: the loss of her father and her animosity and outright distrust toward her mother. She asks about him when she notices the scrapbook is absent of any picture of him, only for her mother to change the subject. But this is exactly whose memory she seeks to dredge up. Or at least they remain silent when it comes to Villanelle’s dead father.

Jade pinner how to#

She seems frozen in her mother’s embrace, unsure of how to proceed or make sense of what she’s experiencing.Īs Villanelle spends more time with her family, playing card games, looking through scrapbooks at her childhood pictures (she did have a bulbous head as a baby, apparently), a picture rises to the surface of a family that lives by silence. Her body stiff, her face flickering through emotional states. When Tatiana sees Villanelle she drops her bags on the floor and embraces her tearfully, whispering her birth name, “Oksana.” Comer maximizes Villanelle’s discomfort with such affection. When Villanelle hears her mother, Tatiana (Evgenia Dodina), is coming home, she rushes into a panic trying to escape. He asks her what food Elton would eat in Athens, Istanbul, and Vienna, as he’s delighted by the scope of her life outside of their familial bond. While the older family members discuss this shock, Villanelle spends time with Bor’ka, who is obsessed with Elton John. It’s only when her brother Pyotr enters that the truth comes to light: she’s Oksana, his sister they long thought dead of a fire in an orphanage. Villanelle pointedly replies in English even as other family members pour into the room wondering about this stranger. She’s found by her very young half brother, Bor’ka, who asks who she is in Russian. Finding the door open, she tentatively enters the home surveying the detritus of familial life: photographs of her mother and stepfather punctuate the walls, food is being cooked on the stove, a television hums with life in the living room. In rural Russia, Villanelle walks down a sun-dappled stretch of road, blaring music from her headphones, heading to her family’s home.

And while the answers found feel too pat, too final, Jodie Comer’s performance is a masterclass in portraying conflicted emotions. Written by Suzanne Heathcote and directed by Shannon Murphy, “Are You From Pinner?” searches for answers about Villanelle’s beginnings and what they say about who she is now. I’m reminded of that by this week’s episode, “Are You From Pinner?”, in which Villanelle seeks answers for the long held questions she’s had about her mother, her family, and what their history says about her present. Vestiges of it continue to affect the story I tell myself about who my mother is and how she fits into my life. There is something about this schism that rooted itself in my mind. But it was a performance, one whose ebbs and flows I studied with intensity to understand her. But when we were around her friends she’d be the mother I always wanted. If anything she could be distant and cold, a question I was always trying to find an answer for.

When we were alone she was never physically affectionate. When I was a child I noticed a stark difference in my mother’s actions.