South Riding
Dec. 15th, 2013 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThis has clearly been the weekend for being disappointed by British period dramas. I was most impressed by the first episode of South Riding, a miniseries about a woman who has returned to her hometown in Yorkshire in the 1930s to become headmistress of the girls’ high school, but it drifted gently downhill from there.
Actually, in terms of quality, I think South Riding is pretty good: the characters are vivid, the plotlines unpredictable (if sometimes hard to follow, because there are so many of them), and the period sets, clothes, and ideas seem lived-in, if you will: everyone, writers, actors, set designers, seems to have felt comfortable, so it feels real.
It’s just that it’s a real downer.
It also isn’t quite what I expected. The description led me to expect more focus on the students, but two of the girls (who are the only two students, now that I think of it, who get names) get storylines, and those storylines are largely about their relationships with adults. The story is more about the town, and in particular on the group that seems to run the town: the school board and the town council and the planning committee are all drawn from the same group of people.
This is actually very well done, although the show does have some trouble fitting all of its ensemble cast into three episodes. It’s rare that I think something should be longer, but an episode or two more might have given the story more space to breathe without needing to drop some storylines unresolved.
In particular, I was disappointed that Midge Carne’s storyline got dropped. She’s the only daughter of Robert Carne, a member of the local gentry, who starts at the local girls’ high school partly because her family has money troubles and can’t send her to a classier school, and partly because her father is worried that her isolation is eating away at her hereditarily fragile mental health.
Often, Midge seems strangely affectless, as if she’s living life at a remove. When she tells her father about her school experiences, its as if she’s not talking about something that happened to her, but reading him a school story in a book. Similarly, when she acts as hostess, she seems to be acting out a script.
But other times, Midge works herself up into a frenzy. If her father is late getting home, for instance, she stands at the window, telling herself over and over again that he must be all right, until she loses control and dashes, almost sobbing in panic, to talk to her mother’s portrait - her mother, we learn, who is insane.
Obviously this is not a story that is going to have a resolution per se, but I wanted something a bit better than Midge walking out of the story.
One of the themes of the show is generational cycles. Sarah Burton, the headmistress, says that she wants to teach her students that they don’t have make the same mistakes as their parents - that their heritage doesn’t need to be a trap. Lydia, the other student, does manage to break free, but the Carnes can’t.
During the Great War, Robert Carne married Muriel, a beautiful, vivacious, but mentally unstable young woman. When we first meet her, she almost jumps off the roof, not out of suicidal despair but in manic high spirits. She knows having a baby would probably drive her insane.
But she does get pregnant. Robert Carne, on leave from the front, walks in on Muriel in negligee having drinks with a bunch of soldiers and rapes her in a fit of jealousy. The trauma of the birth drove her from mental instability to incurable insanity. Carne, both in penance and because he still loves her, pays for years of expensive residential treatment for her, even though he has to mortgage his beloved family home to do so.
This lends a certain amount of dramatic irony to a later scene. Over the course of their fitfully developing romance, Carne tells Sarah Burton - without going into details - that he ruined his wife’s life. She assures him that it can’t be so, but the viewers know that his self-perception is accurate. He’s not speaking out of exaggerated self-loathing: he probably should hate himself and maybe doesn’t deserve to be happy.
Obviously this leaves the show in something of a quandary. Should Carne scuttle his budding romance with Sarah as part of his penance for his sins? Even though by doing so, he would hurt two innocent people: not only Sarah but Midge, who adores Sarah and sorely needs more parental figures less dour than her father? But in making them happy, he would make himself happy (or at least happier), and that doesn’t really seem fair, as Muriel’s life is still ruined.
I don’t think there’s a really satisfactory answer, and the show ultimately doesn’t try to give one. It solves, or rather shelves, the question by having a cliff collapse beneath Carne while he stares angstily out at the sea.
This disrupts most of the other storylines in the show: Carne’s romance with Sarah Burton, the unfolding corruption in the council, and, most important to me, Midge’s story. Carne wanted Midge to stay with a local woman who has acted as a grandmother to her - which would have kept her in the story! - but instead she goes with her grandfather, whom she has never hitherto met, to live in his ancestral hall.
And then we only see her one more time: sitting in her grandfather’s hall, having her portrait painted. It recalls her mother’s portrait, which suggests that Midge’s life is going to follow much the same path as her mother’s: she, too, will end up incurably insane.
Actually, in terms of quality, I think South Riding is pretty good: the characters are vivid, the plotlines unpredictable (if sometimes hard to follow, because there are so many of them), and the period sets, clothes, and ideas seem lived-in, if you will: everyone, writers, actors, set designers, seems to have felt comfortable, so it feels real.
It’s just that it’s a real downer.
It also isn’t quite what I expected. The description led me to expect more focus on the students, but two of the girls (who are the only two students, now that I think of it, who get names) get storylines, and those storylines are largely about their relationships with adults. The story is more about the town, and in particular on the group that seems to run the town: the school board and the town council and the planning committee are all drawn from the same group of people.
This is actually very well done, although the show does have some trouble fitting all of its ensemble cast into three episodes. It’s rare that I think something should be longer, but an episode or two more might have given the story more space to breathe without needing to drop some storylines unresolved.
In particular, I was disappointed that Midge Carne’s storyline got dropped. She’s the only daughter of Robert Carne, a member of the local gentry, who starts at the local girls’ high school partly because her family has money troubles and can’t send her to a classier school, and partly because her father is worried that her isolation is eating away at her hereditarily fragile mental health.
Often, Midge seems strangely affectless, as if she’s living life at a remove. When she tells her father about her school experiences, its as if she’s not talking about something that happened to her, but reading him a school story in a book. Similarly, when she acts as hostess, she seems to be acting out a script.
But other times, Midge works herself up into a frenzy. If her father is late getting home, for instance, she stands at the window, telling herself over and over again that he must be all right, until she loses control and dashes, almost sobbing in panic, to talk to her mother’s portrait - her mother, we learn, who is insane.
Obviously this is not a story that is going to have a resolution per se, but I wanted something a bit better than Midge walking out of the story.
One of the themes of the show is generational cycles. Sarah Burton, the headmistress, says that she wants to teach her students that they don’t have make the same mistakes as their parents - that their heritage doesn’t need to be a trap. Lydia, the other student, does manage to break free, but the Carnes can’t.
During the Great War, Robert Carne married Muriel, a beautiful, vivacious, but mentally unstable young woman. When we first meet her, she almost jumps off the roof, not out of suicidal despair but in manic high spirits. She knows having a baby would probably drive her insane.
But she does get pregnant. Robert Carne, on leave from the front, walks in on Muriel in negligee having drinks with a bunch of soldiers and rapes her in a fit of jealousy. The trauma of the birth drove her from mental instability to incurable insanity. Carne, both in penance and because he still loves her, pays for years of expensive residential treatment for her, even though he has to mortgage his beloved family home to do so.
This lends a certain amount of dramatic irony to a later scene. Over the course of their fitfully developing romance, Carne tells Sarah Burton - without going into details - that he ruined his wife’s life. She assures him that it can’t be so, but the viewers know that his self-perception is accurate. He’s not speaking out of exaggerated self-loathing: he probably should hate himself and maybe doesn’t deserve to be happy.
Obviously this leaves the show in something of a quandary. Should Carne scuttle his budding romance with Sarah as part of his penance for his sins? Even though by doing so, he would hurt two innocent people: not only Sarah but Midge, who adores Sarah and sorely needs more parental figures less dour than her father? But in making them happy, he would make himself happy (or at least happier), and that doesn’t really seem fair, as Muriel’s life is still ruined.
I don’t think there’s a really satisfactory answer, and the show ultimately doesn’t try to give one. It solves, or rather shelves, the question by having a cliff collapse beneath Carne while he stares angstily out at the sea.
This disrupts most of the other storylines in the show: Carne’s romance with Sarah Burton, the unfolding corruption in the council, and, most important to me, Midge’s story. Carne wanted Midge to stay with a local woman who has acted as a grandmother to her - which would have kept her in the story! - but instead she goes with her grandfather, whom she has never hitherto met, to live in his ancestral hall.
And then we only see her one more time: sitting in her grandfather’s hall, having her portrait painted. It recalls her mother’s portrait, which suggests that Midge’s life is going to follow much the same path as her mother’s: she, too, will end up incurably insane.
