You know that it can’t be as simple as it first appears. But it does seem that way for an impressively long time as the story of Fifteen-Love begins. Aidan Turner plays professional tennis coach Glenn Lapthorn who is accused of sexual abuse by his former protege Justine Pearce (Ella Lily Hyland, in her first major screen role), five years after she suffered a career-ending injury just as they were both about to break into the sporting big time. The opening scenes show her at 17, just before what will turn out to be her last match, kissing him and him pushing her away, wiping his mouth in horror – “We talked about this!”
For most of the opening episode it looks as if this is a case of a hormonal teenager overcome by unavoidable daily close proximity to a handsome man with whom, in the way of elite athletes and their coaches, she also has an equally unavoidably intense mental relationship. After the kiss, we cut to five years later when Justine has become a physiotherapist at her former training academy, and is given to taking male clients’ minds off their pain as she works, by analysing the psychology behind women’s rape fantasises for them. Is this the hypersexualisation of someone abused in their teens? Or just a hyper-confident young woman not over-committed to her job or its boundaries? Either way, it is the beginning of an absolutely superlative performance by Hyland, who holds the many facets of her character (courtesy of a rigorous script by Hania Elkington) in perfect tension. She is dislikable, vulnerable, grief-stricken, a case of forced maturity and arrested development at the same time and mesmerising throughout.
When Glenn suddenly reappears in her life, as a new ambassador for the academy, her long-simmering complex feelings for him boil over. Is it resentment at him abandoning her after her injury and moving on to other up-and-comers? Is it jealousy of his current success in a sport she deeply misses and without which she has been drifting aimlessly? Is it the rage and panic of a victim at seeing the perpetrator of crimes against her again, unabashed and unpunished? Could it be all – or none – of the above?
When she (probably mistakenly) thinks her best friend, Renee (Harmony Rose Bremner), is having an affair with Glenn, she goes to the police and reports him for assaulting her when she was 16 “many, many times.” He is arrested and tells the police that she has always been volatile, untrustworthy and that this is her way of dealing with the trauma of losing her career. The natural recourse of the sexual predator, you might think – except that her friend Steve (Tom Varey) who witnessed the pre-match kiss very much saw it as the result of the crush he knew she had on Glenn. Renee (who wonders why Justine never mentioned any predatory behaviour to her at the time) and the head of the academy Andi Woodward (Anna Chancellor) as well as Justine’s mother, Carol (Elizabeth Berrington), are all of a similar mind.
From there, the complications only increase throughout the remaining five episodes as further scenes from the past are revealed. Other motivations – be they emotional, practical, financial – emerge and convolutions abound. A few might have been sacrificed in order to dig more deeply into the many psychological and other issues raised, but overall it is an effective study of how deeply truth can be obscured by unpalatable parts of it, by deliberate and unconscious subterfuge, by ambition, deflection, denial, our willingness to believe only good things of likable people and only bad of the dislikable. A complicated business, being human.
Fifteen-Love is on Prime Video.
