Lady in the Lake: a stunning show that uses murder and mystery to explore the parallel lives of two women in 1960s Baltimore

Lady in the Lake opens with a classic mystery premise: a man unceremoniously dumping a female corpse under a midnight blue sky. Less conventionally, it is narrated by the voice of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), the dead woman herself. In this speech, Cleo directly addresses Maddie Morgenstern (Natalie Portman), the woman who will later play investigator, for having professed to care about her, but “truth is, you came at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning.”

While spiking the viewer’s interest, such an opening also challenges how tales of murder are more usually framed. When told through the activity of an investigator, a victim’s story can only be pieced together through fragments of evidence. By contrast, this drama will be all about agency, notably the agency of women constrained by the ties of family and community.

An Apple Original, Lady In Lake was adapted and directed by Alma Har’el (Honey Boy), and is based on a novel by Laura Lippmann that was itself inspired by two historical murders.

The action is set in Baltimore in 1966, a divided city made feverish with civil rights tensions and in which a young Jewish girl, Tessie, disappears during a Thanksgiving parade. While we know Maddie will investigate Cleo’s death at some point, this narrative line is postponed. Instead, the the first few episodes of the series parallel the events in both their lives during the period leading up to Cleo’s death.

Maddie is a bored, troubled and affluent Jewish housewife, who once dreamed of becoming a journalist. Cleo is an African-American woman struggling to hold down several jobs and bring up two sons, exasperated by her work-shy husband, Slappy (Byron Bowers).

The two women’s lives begin to intersect in ways that are significant, but of which are not immediately aware. One early instance comes when their eyes make fleeting contact as Maddie chooses a dress modelled by Cleo, who is working as a live mannequin in a department store window. The deference paid by the shop staff to Maddie reveals the unequal power that each woman enjoys. However, later incidents reveal similarities in the way each is held back or propelled towards a different outcome.

Maddie escapes her marriage, leaving her son behind and moving into a flat in the relative freedom of a black district. At the same time, Cleo is drawn reluctantly into a dangerous underground world in order to support her sons.

1960s Baltimore is recreated with impressive scale. More intangibly, the mood of the time is conjured up through a pointedly evocative soul and jazz soundtrack, cutaways to billboards and scenes fleshed out with a hazy colour palette of moody blues and browns.

Har’el’s direction and storytelling is visually ingenious and keenly paced.

Occasional surrealist dream sequences offer insight into both women’s private anxieties, and feature metaphors of innocence (lambs) or entrapment (fish, both in and out of tanks), often culminating in rhythmic, synchronised dance routines.

Surrealism itself is mentioned explicitly, recalled in flashback by Maddie as a “search for the marvellous”, a way to convey the inexpressible. Aptly enough, it is by conveying something of the two women’s inner lives and complicated cultural identities that the drama really finds its mark.

For this, the show’s “mystery” element seems to be a pretext, simply a way to link the two stories. The real gravitational pull on the plot, at least in the first few episodes, is the doomed playing out of events leading to the inevitable.

Thematically, there is much reflection on Baltimore’s social groups. There’s a lot of active questioning of the black and white opposition that came to define relations in the city. To the black communities, Maddie is often, simply, white, but to white gentiles (non-Jewish) she is one of “you people”.

More acutely, perhaps, Cleo is caught between rival promises of black power. She is drawn to her rightful “destiny” – supporting equality through desegregated education and other strategies advocated by councilwoman Myrtle Summer (Angela Robinson). But she must rely increasingly on the patronage of Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), a local gangster running the “numbers game” (an underground lottery) and owner of the Pharoah, a club at the heart of the city’s jazz scene.

It is relevant, I think, that feminists of that era were later accused of ignoring racial differences between women in order to write their own narrative of subordination as “universal”. In contrast, Lady in the Lake is keenly aware of those differences.

Arguably, the series manages to highlight common ground in Cleo and Maddie’s experiences while acknowledging crucial differences. Maddie’s character has more agency, it seems, and more nuance is given to expressing her equivocal relationship with her own Jewishness. However, none of this lacks self-awareness, or surprises, and suggests that she too has something to learn.

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