I am beholden to this scary world of mob murder
Stick up a paw if you’ve not read The Handmaid’s Tale. (I am typing with one hand here.) Margaret Atwood has hordes of devotees but membership of her cult looks primed for expansion with this commanding new adaptation of a novel published in 1985.
While bad books tend to prosper on screen, the good ones have to take their chances. It helps in this case that Atwood’s dystopia has great visual heft. The novel imagines the ascendancy of totalitarianism in America’s war-sundered near future, and the art department have gone to town. The world of fundamentalist Gilead – all wood, skies and foliage – has a creepy cleanliness. Its brainwashed coven of young women wear an oppressive livery of russet habits and starched wimples.
If there’s plenty to look at in the adaptation, shown on Channel 4 on Sunday, there’s also the riveting Elisabeth Moss as Offred, one of a prized minority of fertile captives – handmaids, also known as Marthas – condemned to rent out their reproductive organs to the barren wives of community leaders. Moss’s beaky physiognomy and hawk-like stares might have been custom-made to play a bowed but unbroken woman incubating secret memories of a previous life, with a sarcastic commentary unspooling in her head.
“I want to see as little of you as possible, do you understand?” snapped her chilly new employer Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski). The camera wisely takes the opposite view. Offred’s impregnation took the form of a cheerless threesome in which Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes, doing a very good creep) impaled her while Serena Joy cradled her head. No wonder this gripping episode climaxed with the handmaids, licensed to punish a rapist, committing vengeful murder by mob.
Samira Wiley, who’s such fun in Orange Is the New Black, is a punchy foil as Offred’s pal Moira, and Ann Dowd terrifies as taser-wielding pedagogue Aunt Lydia. For Atwood nerds, there was a fuzzy cameo of the authoress administering a punitive blow.
Atwood purists may do a double take at the news that a second series has been commissioned for the streaming service Hulu, suggesting infidelity to the source. But hey, there’s already been a ballet, an opera, several plays and a film scripted by Harold Pinter. The more the scarier.
‘Get me Jane Austen on the phone!” At the height of Hollywood’s Austen boom, a less-than-well-read mogul is said to have asked – perhaps apocryphally – for a meeting with a promising source of British costume romcom.
Alas, there were only half a dozen titles to milk, but the Austen industry ploughs on regardless. Pride and Prejudice alone has been repurposed as a Bollywood musical, a time-travel romcom and a zombie movie. And still she keeps on coming.
It was only a matter of time until Lucy Worsley muscled in. Her previous TV outing was also focused on an already overcrowded area – the brides of Henry VIII, with many raids on the dressing-up box. Happily, Worsley kept to her own array of cotton dresses for Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors (BBC Two, Saturday). Aside from re-enacting a play, her tomfoolery was also minimised.
There wasn’t much on the novels. Instead, Worsley put together a life story as seen through Austen’s various residences. It was quite a succinct way of conveying the novels’s preoccupation with money, status and marriage.
Not every house still stands. Austen’s birthplace is now a Hampshire field around which Worsley paced with an archaeologist who had the floorplan in her head. “We’ve come into the lobby.” This was bathos in action. As was an actress littering Austen’s letters with glottal stops.
Visits to Winchester, Bath, Lyme Regis, and various country piles produced more fruitful encounters with bricks and mortar, including the house with a tumbledown exterior in which Austen died. For that bit Worsley stared at the camera with a sad face.
Worsley presents in the key of Marmite. She does love an elongated vowel. “Jane Austen,” she began, “found herself squeeeezed alongside her mother, her sister and a lawyer.” And the infantile word “ginormous” turned up twice. Jane would not approve, and she’s not alone.