MIRREN MAKES CATHERINE GREATER
Actress brings strength to the role — while remaining fully clothed
Catherine the Great Now streaming, Crave
Many people have expressed concern about the amount of sex on Crave’s new miniseries Catherine the Great. Their concern is: There’s not enough of it.
All the clues were in place for an absolute fiesta of frottage. The genre is costume drama, which promises raunch as reliably as soaps promise bickering. The star is Helen Mirren, still a sex symbol in her mid-70s, whose career demonstrates a willingness to depict that side of human experience.
And the subject is Catherine the Great, a woman so lusty that people think she had her way with a horse.
(Mirren says the horse thing is “a complete lie, a classic way of belittling Catherine. She was in fact a serial monogamist.” I am pleased to see the reputation of a strong female leader defended, and of course sexual slurs are very common where powerful women are concerned — but I would perhaps add that when it comes to this equine story, infidelity is not the main problem.)
As it turns out, the four-part series is very tame. You see almost nothing. Even a scene the Sun newspaper describes as a “steamy sex romp, sure to heat up screens” turns out to be a sequence about erectile dysfunction.
All we see is a glimpse of limp genitals as their owner sits apologizing in a chair. Quite the anticlimax for a multitude of disappointed viewers who thought, “Come on, guys, I can get that at home.”
This viewer, however, was relieved. I’m terribly uncomfortable with such things in a respectable TV series. And I say that as someone who’s not especially uncomfortable with pornography. For some reason, I can cope with people monkeying about for real but I find the pretence of it incredibly embarrassing. In a proper drama, it ruins the suspension of disbelief. All I can hear is the poor actors’ internal monologue: “I’m not in it for this! I imagined stage work and Parkinson and nice little suppers! Oh God, I hope there aren’t pimples anywhere I can’t see. I wish I could put my dressing gown on.”
The custom for sexy costume dramas dates back to the classic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice when Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) emerged, dripping, from the family lake. Since then, actors in historical fiction are always showing off their breasts and buttocks, or their “upstairs downstairs” as I call them.
But the original, culture-shifting 1995 scene was quite innocuous: Firth was fully dressed. By the time he encountered Jennifer
Ehle (as Elizabeth Bennet), he’d even dried off. He was just costless, with his long-sleeved shirt untucked and his hair tousled. That was the whole point: In such proper circumstances, mere dishevelment was enough to reveal the physicality beneath the gentility. It brought Regency courtship alive — the hints, the implications, the intensity of a look, the stirring jolt of a hand on a waist as one climbed into a carriage. It was electricity before electricity.
There was also (I still remember, two decades later) a great emotional truth to the scene.
The characters were deeply embarrassed: Darcy because he was deshabille, Lizzie because she was poking around his house, both of them because they were experiencing desire. They hurried away from each other, blushing and muttering and feeling like idiots. It was all so real. It was incredibly erotic. For my money, it would have been a lot less interesting if he’d actually got his bum out.
So, there is something revolutionary in bringing the story of Catherine the Great — Catherine the Great, of all people! — to the screen with so little sex on display. It’s a far bigger statement than showing it.
Mirren (also executive producing) has said: “It’s appalling, the way history treats successful, powerful women.” She is clearly instrumental in this decision to play down the raunchiness. The failed-erection scene demonstrates feminine power in two ways. One: The queen’s potency is to the fore while her admirer’s clearly isn’t. Two: Mirren remains fully dressed while he is nude, completely reversing traditional Hollywood mores. We can certainly guess who was paid more.
Thus, Catherine’s majesty is celebrated and the horse forgotten. It’s quite moving. Those who approve of the low bonk count have talked a lot about the “romance” of this series, meaning the courtship of the protagonist and Grigory Potemkin. For me, the greatest romance is between Mirren and the Empress of Russia. Giving her clothes back is a really loving thing to do.
It’s appalling, the way history treats successful, powerful women.