A HARD HABIT TO BREAK...
Gemma Arterton plays a young nun struggling with her vows in this steamy period drama
BLACK NARCISSUS Sunday-Tuesday, BBC1, 9pm
All these nuns are getting to be a bit of a habit for BBC drama during the festive holidays. First Dracula met his match in the devout form of Sister Agatha in the supernatural mini-series at the start of the year, and then there was our visit to Nonnatus House for this season’s Call The Midwife Christmas Day special.
Now we’re whisked off to the distant reaches of Asia for an epic, emotionally torrid period drama set in a British Catholic convent in the Himalayas in 1934. A superb cast features two former Bond girls: Gemma Arterton (above, with Chaneil Kular, inset) stars as Sister Clodagh, who leads the young members of her order to their mountain-top mission in the isolated town of Mopu – where the sense of remoteness is as terrifying as the vertiginous views.
Meanwhile, the late Diana Rigg proves her brilliant talent was undiminished to the end, in her penultimate role, playing Mother Dorothea, who dispatches the sisters of St Faith from Darjeeling with the warning: ‘Mopu is a wild place – there isn’t even a policeman there.’
The 1939 novel by Rumer Godden was previously adapted in the classic 1947 film by cinema legends Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, starring Deborah Kerr, but while its unforgettably vivid Technicolor vistas of the Himalayas were in fact some of the greatest matte paintings ever seen on screen, this three-part television series (showing over consecutive nights) adds a new dimension with its all-enveloping atmosphere from filming on location in Nepal.
Bafta-winning scriptwriter Amanda Coe (Apple Tree Yard, The Trial Of Christine Keeler) has crafted an intoxicating saga that turns on Clodagh struggling with her barely repressed sexuality after the nuns take up residence in the stone palace once known as the House of Women, where explicit sensual paintings still decorate the walls.
Soon Clodagh comes up against Mr Dean (Alessandro Nivola), a handsome expat with permanent stubble, and she’s both angered and attracted by this rough-hewn man swathed in his brown leather jacket and an air of cynicism.
But she must also do battle with the dark secrets of Mopu, which were buried decades before her arrival, and the challenge an alien culture that she and the sisters barely understand poses to her ambitious plans and devotion to the order. Her pride and even faith are at stake: should she lose this battle at the very top of the world, there’s a long, long way to fall.