The Handmaid’s Tale: will the TV hit break its cycle of cruelty?

Posted on August 22, 2021 by Admin

Season four of the drama based on Margaret Atwood’s novel has seen Elisabeth Moss’s June in near-constant peril. However, it seems her latent rage could be the thing that sets her free

I find myself wondering why I am still so invested in The Handmaid’s Tale on a weekly basis, as the camera slowly closes in on Elisabeth Moss’s face, her character June pained and broken by cruelty after cruelty. The apocalyptic drama is coming to the end of its fourth run, and when this season began, it found itself boxed into an inevitable corner. How could it sustain the story far beyond Margaret Atwood’s novel, without keeping its characters in a cage, and becoming an unrewarding display of relentless misery?

It had begun to go around in circles. June would defy the rules, escape the authorities, get captured, undergo torture, and then begin the whole cycle again. It made it hard for viewers to feel satisfaction in her victories. What was the point in rooting for her, if she would inevitably end up back at the start?

The Handmaid’s Tale season four review – hope at last in the most harrowing show on TV

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Admin

Elisabeth Moss has always made this impressive if horrifying TV. But as the new series turns June into queen of the rebels, it has a shot of new life

I am not sure if “enjoyment” is quite the right word in relation to watching The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4). It has been, at various points over the last three seasons, either a harrowing slog or an extremely harrowing slog. But at its best, it is impressive, inventive drama that pushes unfamiliar buttons with great skill. It had a magnificent, haunting first season, which largely stuck to the plot of Margaret Atwood’s classic novel, but afterwards it struggled under the weight of its own misery. June (Elisabeth Moss) escaped from Gilead, and was captured, ad infinitum, which made it feel like a gruesome hall of mirrors in which hope was pointless. It made me wonder whether continuing to watch was pointless, too. But a diversion into global politics gave it a shot of new life, and season four continues to explore new ground. It needed it, and it works.

The lengthy recap at the beginning is useful, given that the pandemic delayed production. According to its showrunner, Bruce Miller, the logistics of shooting in Canada also had a direct effect on shaping the story. June organised a cohort of rebels, pulling together an underground network of Marthas and Handmaids, to smuggle 86 children out of Gilead, saving them from life under a brutal regime. The Waterfords have been arrested by the Canadian government and are in captivity, but at the end of season three, it looked as though June may have run out of luck. Still, without her, this is Handmaids’ Tales, rather than The Handmaid’s Tale. If the question is, how much more can one woman endure, then the answer comes quickly: using no anaesthetic, Janine cauterises the shotgun wound in June’s abdomen with a red-hot poker. Welcome to season four.

Death! Dancing! Drinking! The best movie moments of 2020

Posted on December 24, 2020 by Admin

From an unusual first kiss to a horrifying shock death, Guardian writers pick their most impactful big screen bits of the year

Spoilers ahead

History remixed: the rise of the anachronistic female lead

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Admin

The lives of women from history, from Catherine the Great to Shirley Jackson, are being brought to the screen with a radical focus on character over facts

It is a point in favor of TV’s sprawling proliferation that one gets, in the course of a year, both a lush, serious historical drama starring Helen Mirren as Catherine the Great on HBO, and its tonal opposite, Hulu’s raucous, gleefully brutal The Great, which puts an asterisk right on the title card: “An Occasionally True Story.” The Great, developed by Tony McNamara, the writer of absurd court send-up The Favourite, cares little for the historical accuracy of the 18th-century Russian monarch. Its Catherine (Elle Fanning) arrives in the backward, hedonistic Russian court as a naive 19-year-old bride in 1761. The real Catherine was 35 and a mother by then, but that’s fine – free from the constraints of biography or pedantic seriousness, The Great’s occasional truth delivers, ironically, a more lasting impression of a real, flesh and blood princess – one slowly but determinedly amassing power, enlightened but ambitious to rule.