It's quite absorbing and very funny at times. The main story is about a man who thinks his wife is being unfaithful to him so he goes to great lengths to prove his suspicions right. The ancillary stories deal with the illicit love that the wife's sister has for a journalist, the sister of the journalist who goes to live with a wealthy maiden aunt, and the engagement woes a small town vicar encounters when he goes to marry. Those may not seem to be much to hang a whole BBC period production on, but believe me what they do with these slender stories is amazing. The thing is, even though this production is all about those stories and how they intertwine and weave around each other, what this production is really about is the plight of women in Victorian England. Women had it pretty bad back then, and they still do today but back in the Victorian era they were little more than property of their fathers, and then their husbands. If a woman had a husband who treated her as an equal then it was a rare thing indeed. And not only were women the property of men, children were little more than chattel as well. When the jealous husband in question kidnaps his son to spite his wife, there's little she can do about it.
These BBC productions are always first rate and filled with actors you recognize if you watch these things for any length of time. The young women in this production are all impossibly beautiful and poised. And the men are all dashing and handsome, except for the ones who are supposed to be of dubious moral character. The real standout performance wise in this show was David Tennant as the engagement phobic vicar. He steals every scene he vacillates in, and that's to say that's all his scenes. Bill Nighy as the rakish old man who might or might not be porking the beautiful young wife is good in this as well. The character I found annoying was the husband.
I highly recommend this one and I must admit this Trollope guy is growing on me, well at least the adaptions his novels are.
1 comment:
Netflix keeps recommending this one to me, but the title alone kept putting me off. The way you describe it, though, it sounds worth watching.
Post a Comment