TV review

  • Casanova (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    John Glenister, Mark Cullingham (1971)

    Casanova, screened weekly on BBC2 in six episodes in late 1971, was Dennis Potter’s first serial drama for television.  The whole thing lasts 325 minutes and watching it at BFI last week, as a feature in the last segment of their Potter retrospective, I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t meant to be seen either in one sitting or on a cinema screen.  Potter, nevertheless, over the course of his television drama-writing career, made an important contribution to the metamorphosis of the TV play into the TV film and it’s hard not to feel that Casanova is often trying to be cinematic.  Take, for example, the repeated montages of key images from the story, playing in the mind of the title character.  In 1971, it wasn’t that unusual to see this kind of thing from your seat in a picture house but it was an innovation to see it from a chair in your living room.  Some of the ‘filmic’ elements look primitive now.  Casanova combines material shot on location with studio recordings.  At the start of the first episode, a gondola carries representatives of the Venice Tribunal along a canal.  Their late-night destination is Casanova’s apartment, the purpose of their visit to arrest him for atheism, blasphemy, fornication, etc.  The dark canal has a stygian quality; on the soundtrack, the water doesn’t so much lap as slurp; the overall effect is sinister and vaguely disgusting.  But this opening sequence is unusual:  too often there are shots of the city that don’t tell us more than that the BBC did some filming there.  The memory montages tend to be obvious and sometimes lurid – as when the screams of a woman achieving orgasm are juxtaposed with those of a man being publicly flogged to death.   In the final episode, in which the ageing Casanova is working at his memoirs, a draught in the room (aka the cold wind of time) scatters the leaves of paper from the table – a venerable Hollywood cliché.  In spite of this, and though it takes a while to get used to the switches between celluloid and videotape, the studio sections stand up, in technical terms, very well.  The lighting, set decoration, costumes and make-up compare very favourably with, say, the BBC’s I Claudius, which was made five years later.

    I was fifteen coming up sixteen when Casanova was shown in 1971 and I think I saw most, if not all, the episodes.  Its subject and nudity predictably offended Mary Whitehouse and my recollection is that the serial got a lukewarm reception from television critics.  It’s acquired a higher status in retrospect and in the context of the Potter oeuvre as a whole:  W Stephen Gilbert, in Fight and Kick and Bite, his 1996 biography of Potter, judges it ‘a pivotal piece’ and its protagonist ‘unique among [Potter’s] driven characters in not being racked by guilt’.   Potter was first drawn to Giacomo Casanova as the subject of a television drama when book-reviewing for the Times and asked to review the first volume of a new translation of Casanova’s memoirs.  Potter’s psoriatic arthropathy had been getting worse for several years and he clearly sympathised with Casanova’s plight – locked up by the Tribune in ‘the Leads’ (‘i piombi’) of the jail in the Doge’s Palace and not knowing how long he’ll have to stay there.   W Stephen Gilbert notes that Potter, when he began to write Casanova, was ‘more imprisoned than ever by his illness in his Ross-on-Wye fastness’.  Kept under lock and key and, years later, when his health is failing, Casanova finds salvation in reading and writing.  In one episode, his body has developed lesions that require gruesome and painful treatment:  this obviously links to Potter’s condition and anticipates the main character’s illness and treatment in The Singing Detective.

    BFI sensibly included two intervals – the first of twenty minutes after episode two, the second of forty minutes after episode four.  So the whole show ended six hours and five minutes after it began.  It may seem no more than an obvious reaction to such a marathon to say that Potter takes his time telling Casanova’s story.  But I do think the total length of Casanova is out of proportion to its limited plot and themes, even though the piece is chronologically quite complex.  The six episodes include two that alternate between Casanova’s incarceration and his former life, and four that move between the prison cell and his life after prison.   The highlight montages, which accrue new images as the story progresses, are a feature of every episode.  (The success of all kinds of regular television programmes, then and now, depends considerably on repetition.  Casanova may have been a nearly unprecedentedly ambitious television drama but the montages come to seem increasingly like the routines expected by the audience of a weekly TV comedy or variety show.)  In the parts of the story describing Casanova’s post-jail experiences, we soon discover that the ‘impious libertine’ isn’t chastened by his punishment.  He’s all the more committed to sensual pleasure, anxious not to waste a moment of the time that he has left to experience it.  Once the viewer knows this, it increases the pressure on the prison scenes to be compelling per se and, from midway through, these sequences tread water.  ‘I resolve to escape’ becomes close to a mantra in the last episode and a half:  it feels wrong that one’s main interest by this stage is in how Casanova will escape from his physical prison.  Of greater interest is his desire to escape from himself – his appetites – but this is usually asserted in monologue rather than dramatised.

    Women’s bodies – often naked, sometimes sexually abused – became an increasingly controversial element of Dennis Potter’s television drama.  (In response to accusations of misogyny, Potter insisted that his purpose was to expose and deplore misogyny.)  Bare breasts are on display throughout Casanova and particularly well represented in the repeated montages.  It’s not easy, seeing the serial in long retrospect, to keep some of Potter’s later work – Blackeyes, in particular – out of your mind but I think the camera’s gaze on exposed female flesh is defensible here.  This isn’t so much because it’s what you’d expect in the story of a legendary rake but because of the rich complexity of Casanova’s character – a complexity that is thanks partly to Potter’s writing but thanks more to Frank Finlay’s brilliant and fearless performance.   Finlay achieves and sustains a series of remarkable contrasts:  between Casanova’s ardent anticipation of seduction and post-coital cafard; between his arrogance and his self-reproach; between his angry, funny sang-froid in deriding antagonists and the exposed vulnerability of his look when he’s alone in captivity.  He speaks his lines not only with great verve, suppleness and wit but with a vocal musicality that makes him sound Italian, even though he never resorts to aiming for this effect by doing-an-accent.  His voice, in conjunction with his unusual, compelling facial features, creates a convincing exotic.   You’re very conscious of the shape of Finlay’s head, especially his jawline:  his sophisticated, superbly accomplished libertine has a bestial quality and this Casanova, even bewigged and with cologne on his cheeks, gives off a stink of mortality.  Finlay suggests an almost prehistoric skull beneath the skin.  Potter and the directors set their leading man a huge task in the later prison scenes:  he has to work hard to keep them dynamic but you never stop admiring his inventiveness.

    The artistry of Finlay’s Italianate Casanova leaves the other men in the cast looking and sounding emphatically, crudely English.  You’re especially aware of this in the fifth episode, when Casanova travels to England (the people in London are no different from those we’ve encountered in Venice and Grenoble), and in Norman Rossington’s contributions.  His main role is as the Venetian jailer Lorenzo but he’s also Casanova’s English travelling companion on a coach journey to London.  Rossington plays Lorenzo with obvious, unvarying vigour and Cockney vowels:  after a while, the jailer’s daily repetition of phrases and routines starts to work for the actor – you have to acknowledge Rossington’s stamina, anyway.  In the final episode, Graham Crowden is an exception to the anglicising rule but his all-stops-out caricature of a rule-bound German is quickly wearying.  It may be unfair to single out for praise Norman Tyrrell, since he plays an Englishman, but his cameo, as another coach passenger in the English episode, is perfectly judged.  Very few of the young actresses in the roles of Casanova’s conquests went on to better things so it’s important to record how individual and poignant some of them are – particularly Zienia Merton, Brigid Erin Bates, Caroline Dowdeswell and Lyn Yeldham.  (Merton, along with Bates, has kept an acting career going over the decades but it’s hard to ignore the information on IMDB that her next job after Casanova was in The Benny Hill Show.)  In the last part of the last episode, an actress called Gillian Hills is beautifully effective as the German girl who grants Casanova’s carnal deathbed wish, and prays that God remember this as an act of charity on her part.

    Directing duties were split between John Glenister and Mark Cullingham.  (Glenister directed the first, second and fourth episodes and Cullingham the other three.)   They do a decent job although there are times when their attention seems to be so absorbed in mise-en-scène that there’s a loss of dramatic focus.  (For example, episode three begins with a painstaking reconstruction of a commedia dell’arte show but the kerfuffle caused by Casanova in the audience is very sloppily staged.)   It was Dennis Potter, according to John Glenister, who decided on the Vivaldi theme music.  Watching the serial in 1971 was the first time that I’d heard Four Seasons.  I have to admit I’ve continued ever since to think of it as the Casanova music.

    5 July 2015

  • Margaret Thatcher:  The Long Walk to Finchley (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Niall MacCormick (2008)

    The Long Walk to Finchley is described on Wikipedia as a drama and on IMDB as ‘Biography, Drama’.  The latter does acknowledge that it’s a ‘light-hearted retelling of the true story’ of Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long campaign to become a Member of Parliament – a campaign that eventually succeeded when she was elected the MP for Finchley at the 1959 General Election.   In fact, Tony Saint’s TV screenplay is nothing if not a comedy, and a broad one at that.  This is clear from the sarcastic title that ridicules the idea of comparison of this political leader with Nelson Mandela, and relies, as so many British writers before Tony Saint have relied, on the belittling effect of English place names.  IMDB’s ‘true story’ is questionable too, as Saint’s smug subtitle (‘How Maggie Might Have Done It’) makes clear.  Srdjan Kurpjek and Mario Takoushis’s jaunty music underlines the facetious spirit of the piece.   Margaret Thatcher first stood as a parliamentary candidate in the General Election of February 1950, in the safe Labour seat of Dartford.   This film doesn’t bother to explain how she was selected as a candidate there; in view of the difficulties she encounters in finding another constituency that will have her, this might seem a surprising omission – but that’s how shallow The Long Walk to Finchley is.   Although there’s reference to her studying for the bar, Mrs Thatcher’s qualifying as a barrister is glossed over when she briefly decides to give up any hope of a political career.  If she’s not going to the House of Commons, she’s destined to be a housewife.

    The comedy in The Long Walk to Finchley comes often in the form of jokes that rely on the viewer’s prior knowledge of Margaret Thatcher’s future incarnation as a cabinet minister and then prime minister.   Once we hear the aspiring politician stress a commitment to free milk for all British children, we can practically guess the geddit lines to follow.  On honeymoon with Denis, his new wife kicks up a noisy fuss because they’ve been overcharged by a French waiter.  ‘When will you ever go the jungle?’ Margaret’s infant son Mark asks his twin sister Carol, circa half a century before her triumph in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!  In case you don’t pick this up, Mark then asks his mother if he can go to Africa one day and promises he won’t get lost there.  These jokes aren’t confined to the Thatchers – they extend to Edward Heath, although in a different and more personally unkind register.  Immediately suspicious of what he sees as Margaret Roberts’s uncompromising political ambition, the young Heath, to stress the importance of being a team-player in politics, uses the analogy of an orchestra but he’s seen by others, even in his early thirties, as a hopelessly confirmed bachelor and described, to his face, as preferring ‘to be alone with your organ’.  Once he becomes an MP in 1950, Margaret is encouraged to cultivate Ted as a political mentor.  He mistakes her clumsy flattery (‘With men like you thrusting forward …’) for a sexual approach and is terrified.

    It’s not surprising that most screen depictions of Margaret Thatcher to date have made fun of her.  Her influence on British life was large and largely destructive – if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.   As the reception of The Iron Lady three years on from this BBC film made clear, anything other than outright mockery of Thatcher is liable to be seen, in this country anyway, as contemptibly sympathetic towards her.  Although the jocose tone of The Long Walk to Finchley is very different from that of the confused Iron Lady, Tony Saint and the director Niall MacCormick hit the same problem that any account of Margaret Thatcher’s early political life is liable to hit:  the class and misogynist prejudices that she’s up against in the Tory establishment of the day, even when the grandee-chauvinists are as crudely caricatured as they mostly are here, are enraging enough for you to start rooting for her.  The film-makers try to get round this by having Margaret sometimes use her ‘feminine’ side to break through – she pretends to be tearful and strategically adjusts her skirt length and so on (see too the image on the DVD sleeve for The Long Walk to Finchley[1]).  I guess that Saint and MacCormick thought this would be effective because it makes fun of their protagonist as well as her antagonists but it still leaves you on the side of someone you feel you should be finding as loathsome as the real thing was.  It’s interesting too that suggesting, even for satirical effect, that Margaret Thatcher knew how to look good is enough to get an angry reaction in some parts of the British press.  In a Guardian article of June 2008 (‘Margaret Thatcher a style icon? Do me a favour’), Zoe Williams described the casting of Andrea Riseborough as Thatcher as ‘ludicrously flattering’ to the woman she was impersonating.

    Andrea Riseborough’s portrait is essentially a lampoon but she’s very witty.  In view of how much she has to say, it was probably a wise decision on Riseborough and Niall MacCormick’s part, because a relief for the audience, to give us a Margaret Thatcher more voice-trained than she may have been in the 1950s.  At first, the script is anxious to nail her lack of a sense of humour.  It always seemed to me that Mrs Thatcher was something worse:  she thought, mistakenly, that she did have a sense of humour, and Andrea Riseborough captures that well.  The way she tilts her head and looks pained at what an interlocutor is saying looks silly until you remember that Thatcher really was like this, at least by the time she was running the country.   Riseborough gets well-judged support from Rory Kinnear, who plays Denis rather sympathetically.  Samuel West has the decency to make Edward Heath, gnawed by political anxiety and emotional fearfulness, a substantially uncomfortable fellow.   Within the well-populated old boy networks of the Conservative Party, Oliver Ford Davis is amusing as the chairman of candidates and Geoffrey Palmer outstanding as John Crowder, the long-standing MP for Finchley whom Margaret Thatcher succeeded, virtually over Crowder’s dead body.  Palmer expresses Crowder’s reactionary misogyny as something seriously felt and meant – which gives impetus to Andrea Riseborough’s coruscating dressing-down of him, as the Finchley constituency party prepares to select its parliamentary candidate for the General Election of 1959.

    1 July 2015

    [1]  http://tinyurl.com/o7uv7q4

     

     

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