Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) and Dr Patrick Schofield (Stuart Wilson), Scene of Darkness
Dear friends and readers,
A third blog on the unusually good police series, Prime Suspect: I’ve now watched The Lost Child, Scent of Darkness , which I want briefly to compare with Christopher Reid and Niall MacCormack’s Song of Lunch, a more typical heroine’s text (a 2 hour film from PBS Masterpiece theater this year), and the older fine mystery thrillers film adaptations of John LeCarre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. So you see how I’ve been riveting myself into wakefulness in the late nights these weeks. These two new Prime Suspects continue the exploration of sexuality, women’s issues (here motherhood) and male violence against women begun in the previous three stories. They also develop Jane Tennison’s story more centrally.
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The last concluding shot of Lost Child
Lost Child
This is the fourth of the Prime Suspect Stories; they have changed format. Story 1 and 2 and 3 were mini-series, each with 4 episodes. Lost Child & Scent of Darkness are both two hours long, the Americanized format of mini-series that winston Graham complained destroyed the attempt to bring back Poldark in 1996. The briefer time frame does not seem to hurt these two Prime Suspect stories as they can do without the leisurely kind of realism the Poldark and other naturalistic books require, but we do get less development of the characters and events are sprung on us where the film-makers rely on the actor’s ability to persuade us this new inner self we didn’t see before was there all along.
Lost Child brings together pederasty and also motherhood — quite a combination. What happened is this: a child, little girl, seems to have been kidnapped from Susan Covington (Beaty Ednie) a mother who has continued to cherish the child just as much as she did before its father John Warwick (played by Adian Lukis wonderfully well – the Wickham archetype fits here) deserted them to have liaisons with more than one woman and moved North. A scene with Tennison shows him at first defiant and nonchalant, not denying he did it even if he lied and was nearby while the murder occurred: he spent the afternoon in bed with a woman who is engaged to marry someone else. Susan, the mother, is hysterical; she goes on TV begging for her child to be returned safely to her.
About half-way through for the first time I had begun to feel that in a way these series could pander to the bigoted paranoia of people, especially surrounding sexual experience vis-a-vis children. The suspect is someone she has also filmed in the park; her film and identification points to Chris Hughes (John Glenister) who served 14 years for molesting minors. I was troubled by the harshness of the response to Chris; I hasten to say I have no agenda for child molesters, only that Hughes was treated so brutally: one of the police officers, Jack Ellis (Tony Muddyman) beats Chris savagely upon trying to arrest him when Chris (understandably) tries to flee the ferocity of this bunch. Jane Tennison is as ferocious and will not listen to any alibis of Chris, especially since she finds he still indulges in saving photos of girls in albums. She is throughout dressed severely; in 3 she was homeliness and clutzyness itself; here she is repeatedly in tight cut black suits, her hair severe, knife-like puritanical elegance:
We are led to suspect Chris just as much by Chris’s relationship to his wife/partner Anne Sutherland (Lesley Sharpe). They seem not be be getting along. Ann seems to be hiding something; she falsified an alibi; Chris over-reacts to situations we see; he is sensitive man who has suffered a long time, was abused in prison because he was a pederast. He insists too strongly he’s fine now. Well, he’s not altogether; they have troubled sex. He saves pornographic magazines in a drawer.
The story seems to culminate in the police trying to wrest Chris/Glenister from his house where he is holed up and taking Anne and their two children, girls both, hostage. The police promise not to have snipers, but they lie and start to shoot; hysterical, he grabs a child and returns to the house.
Now here is where I saw I was wrong and the film was slowly leading us to see that even pederasts should not be pre-judged; they can change, reform; they deserve understanding, sympathy. Suddenly and without preparation to explain why we are led to think that after all Christ didn’t do it beyond that a psychiatrist, Dr Patrick Schofield (played by Stuart Wilson) says adamently in his view Chris/Glenister could not have done it. Somehow when Chris is chased down by the police Susan loses it. She goes hysterical in a new way when she sees Chris and his wife’s children. A long soliloquy brings out slowly how tired she had become of her daughter,, how relentless her life with her (from job to child care, to job again), how the girl irritated her by screaming, screaming, screaming, endless demands, never ceasing, never giving her a moment to herself.
The murderer was Susan. The mother suffocated the daughter. She was (we are to see) given no help and had herself to come up with the baby-sitting money. The roar of anger and distress that comes from her is stunning.
The show is about how insanely we react to child molester (who to be sure, those who are, can do awful things; that they are or can be suffering people too. But it’s also about how motherhood is experienced in our society and its phoninesss and pretenses (which Susan inveighs against in the long closing near soliloquy Tennison and her aide, Sgt [police officers) Chris Cromwell (played by Sophie Stanton) rejoins the show (she was in Episode 1 as Jane’s sidekick) and its hardships. What it asks of a woman.
The frame is important. It’s a “termination” — as it opens Jane has an abortion, a left-over from her love affair with an older lover, now married, was part of Prime Suspect 3. Jane is roaring mad at the death of this child because she has lost her own. The title refers to her abortion as well as the loss of Susan’s child.
I know audience members could be strengthened in their opposition to abortion and say, see how over-reacting made Jane blame Chris, and also liken Jane to Susan as two murderers. But that would be entirely false to the feeling of the series. Jane had a hard time getting time off enough for the “termination” — it’s called, and the child would get badly in the way of her career. This does not mean she does not feel bad too, at some level identify with Susan, not as a murderer but as someone in the grip of unfair choices There is too much sacrifice required of women as mothers.
It did need to be longer. We did not learn enough about Jack Warwick’s and Susan’s relationship nor Chris/Anne Sunderland’s. Susan’s confession was sprung too quickly. Still that Chris/Glenister’s innocence is sprung on us works very well. He is never idealized and on the surface could have been prosecuted, even found guilty. No sentimental ideals are pushed before us and a lot of cruel mindless over-reaction. The ambiguities made me think of James’s Turn of the Screw often read (wrongly) misogynistically.
Another effect of cutting the time for the story in the fourth season was indeed to focus on Mirren. She became a continual presence. The film-makers decided to marginalize the other police officers because they didn’t have time to cover them all. IN the next story she was made the focus deliberately.
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Jane (Mirren) and Patrick (Wilson) talking, she intently, he companionably (Scent of Darkness)
The Scent of Darkness
I did have trouble understanding it; that is to say, I couldn’t upon my first watching figure out how the murderer or quite why the murderer did what he did because so much was elliptical and just piled in. It was like watching a story meant to be 3 hours or 4 done in a couple of hours and 20 minutes.
Scent of Darkness had a different script writer, director, and producer: suddenly it all men; Lydna La Plante gone, Sally Head gone. But it was as strongly feminist as ever. By happenstance over on WMST-l the women were talking of how feminists are endlessly accused of being prigs and not have a sense of humor when the case is what’s said to be funny is really not funny to its victims (women in general) and helping to find books which showed this. Scent of Darkness opens with Tennison angry because a woman she wants promoted is not being promoted. The panel in front of her says that’s because this woman is not a team-player, doesn’t get along. Tennison asks for proof? “She has no sense of humor.”
Right.
But I also liked it and was eager to re-watch. I especially (I admit) liked the focus on Jane and giving her an on-going private life and relationship with the psychiatrist she had begun to like and trust in Lost Child: Stuart Wilson as Jane’s boyfriend and the relationship that was suggested. It appealed, and he as an older man (he was Ferdinand Lopez in Pallisers, and in Jewel in the Crown, the shit who impregnates Sarah and she knows better than to want to marry so by her mother and aunt is driven to have an abortion) who is amoral/immoral made empathetic by giving him kindness and acceptance and tolerance if not a will to commit.
Well, my second watching made the program not only make sense but showed the implicitly feminist scene that opened the program was the clue or twig developed for the rest. In addition, for the first time Jane Tennison was slightly more central than the murder story; hitherto her story has been parallel, going alongside sometimes, almost equal in the first program but not the center as it was here.
Basically it’s a reprise of Story or Season 1. Instead of Sergeant Otley trying to get rid of Jane, we have the chief detective in charge who makes the comment, “she had no sense of humor” to Tennison: David Thorndike (played by Stephen Boxer): Thorndike is intensely motivated to destroy Tennison’s career and not quite consciously decides that the two new murders of the first mini-series were not done by the man who Jane put in prison.
In other words, she was responsible for a tremendous miscarriage of justice then. He uses a book that has been published by someone whom George Marlowe fools.
So we have to return to the story matter and central theme of malicious brutal violence against women. What emerges is his time the real murderer is the jailor of Marlowe: there is a problem of probability here — perhaps why I didn’t get what was happening. The idea that jailor seems subject to Marlowe and is acting out Marlowe’s violence doesn’t quite wash, but this allows for Jane having to resolve an old case and return to its issues.
A problem this film had too was this time not all the actors returned. Richard Hawley has been in all the series and he was used centrally as someone loyal to her and that helped bind the films.
DI Richard Haskons (Richard Hawley)
Together they break a code, though since the case is hers, she is repeatedly hauled over the coals in public, reprimanded, taken off the case finally (when she insists she was right in the first place) and at last just about fired. So the humiliations of women a member of WWTTA said are so typical of women’s films are here in spades — but with a twist. We see the way she is made to kowtow, plead for herself, admit error are not only unfair, but shown to be wrong and partly the result of the misogynistic Thorndike. She she wins in the end because silently the intelligent and decent people (John Benfield as her superior, DCS Michael Kernan) are on her side. The very top man is just and lucid.
What I loved best was the slow development of her relationship with Stuart Wilson as Patrick Schofield — from missing a movie they neither of them wanted to see, to taking a bath together while they drink and smoke, to watching TV, to sleeping together, getting up in the morning. It really felt real this, though again we had to strain at the improbability that Patrick, a man who seems so ontologically on her side, would allow himself to interview and half countenance the author of the book who wrote the book saying Jane was wrong. This leads to Jane suspecting Patrick is betraying her and gives rise to powerful scenes of conflicting emotions (in this viewer too) as we watch them seem to break apart. They don’t.
This is one of the stories that has a happy-ish ending, not group exultation this time but Jane asking Thorndike to dance and then sneering at him before she returns to Patrick’s table. Very human.
Not that the violence against women is at all marginalized or the way Jane is almost fired and humiliated for good. I can’t say in real life she would have been fired, for in real life none of this would have happened in this way at all. It’s fairy tale this one, more so than the previous.
A kiss
Maybe it’s the men doing it made a love story and powerful or empowered woman (they would believe that) so central. Mirren was here more central than the previous 5 stories, only I do think without Stuart Wilson the depths of feeling at moments would not have been there. This too is part of a woman’s life and in this story Mirren could carry off having happiness in private as well as success in public.
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She (Emma Thompson) in Song of Lunch
I want to compare Mirren to Emma Thompson as archetypes. I watched the powerful Song of Lunch two nights ago and it has rightly been given favorable reviews: this one retells the story and slowly developing ironic poetic perspective. The film is an adaptation of a poem by Christopher Reid.
At first I loved it, then by the end I found myself angered by one of the two opposing themes or messages that were conveyed: the one where we are to despise the misery of “he” (Alan Rickman) as brought on by himself.
He (Alan Rickman)
I know you can take it the opposing way, but only by watching a good deal of the movie against the grain. In the movie Thompson plays an archetype she often does — not acknowledged. The headmistress, her teeth a kind of vagina dentata. she was that in spades in An Education. A part of this comes out in her as Elinor Dashwood, dry lone unmarried possible old maid. Here it grated strongly because she was not a victim (as in Wit) and was so sleek and well-adjusted, such a winner with her successful novelist husband, beautiful flat, life, daughters. Maybe Rickman was self-absorbed, narcissistic, felt sorry for himself, spoiled the lunch by his morbid behavior, but he was genuine and his faults preferable to her self-complacency, conventional success, coolness.
I suppose Reid maybe did hate “she” but the film makers made “she” our norm that is good not ambiguous, not cold, not the result of luck. In Mirren’s series we see the common fates of women.
So for me I much prefer the drunken, half-incompetent, often wretched (behind the scenes they fight and spoil things for one another) Wilson-Mirren archetype to this of Thompson, with what she demands of Rickman and he can’t come up to. I’m saying that at heart I find after all I’m preferring Mirren’s archetypal iconography fully than Thompson’s as developed by films with their pro-social, pro-conventional moral turns. Helen Mirren’s films have taught me something that I had not realized was part of Emma Thompson’s.
Lastly: the film adaptation of LeCarre’s Tinker Tailor (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982)
Smiley (Alec Guiness) and Peter Guillam (Michael Jayston)
I have been struck with how LeCarre through Hopcraft (Tinker Tailor) or Hopkins (Smiley’s People) is an inverse presentation of Lynda Plante’s perspective, or perhaps I should say she has reversed LeCarre’s. LeCarre is a rare male writer not to be a misogynist finally or anti-feminist. He is often deeply sympathetic to his heroines, makes them strong, independent, complicated. Not marginalized. Yet not central. As adapted into films, they are victims in the sense of LaPlante: the world stacked against them, men murderous. In Tinker Tailor by episode 3 one young woman who gets involved with the circus (spies) has been abducted, probably raped, tortured, killed. We never see her but the experience Ricki Tarr (Hywell Bennett drop dead beautiful in the Anthony Andrews mould) has galvanizes himself into action to expose the “mole.” We see Smiley (Alec Guiness) visit an old girlfriend, now retired from the circus because she found out too much and her hands are twisted from torture; she is clearly as old as she is utterly available. She is left with an old dog for company, “safe” in Oxford – lovely street off a fine park. The eldely actress reminded me of Dorothy Tutin. In Smiley’s People we have an older woman (Eileen Atkins) who has lived a desolate life separated from her daughter as the underlying motivating story. The same holds true of Meirelles Constant Gardener
Both Smiley and Wilson are presented as protective tender man (reminding me of Robin Ellis as Poldark in some of his behaviors to towards his two beloved women). Plante took their women and made them center repeatedly, made us see the torture, the rape, their desperate lives. The mode, the action, the implications, and the larger political issues are then feminized.
Ellen
Mike: “he Brit TV police dramas tend to the grim side. I am just finishing re-watching Waking the Dead. And the series MI5 was just too much. I like my “reality” TV in small doses.”
Still see _Five Full Days_ if you get a chance (Gwyneth Hughes the writer, Ann Pivcevic the producer).
http://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/anne-pivcevic-and-gwyneth-hughess-typical-movies-and-hughess-five-days/
The new ones by women have brought into play interesting psychology and genuine pictures of private life. Mirren and her team still keep it to the side and conventionalized to some extent. It does have a qualified uplift in the end. We see the father character (accused black man) get to leave whole and take his children (all fine) home.
E.M.
Mike: “”I’ll take a look. And another was The Red Riding Trilogy, criminy — you want to kill yourself after each episode. Well, I only watched the first two, I couldn’t take it. Fictionalized account of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in the 70s. You’d sooner open the door to a dangerous-looking stranger than a Yorkshire policeman.”
I have them — Jim downloaded them. Alas, I need a subtitles. The accents just bewilder me. But I was probably too tired. The citation is very apt, Mike.
I could see it was powerful and had some superb actors. The world of Yorkshire where I lived was there. The entrepreneurs. And yes the corruption — how it’s done.
Ellen
Mike: “I’ll add that I have dvr’ed about 10 epi’s of Prime Suspect off some channel but I find it hard to engage in the middle … like a soap opera, you kind of have to begin at the beginning to really get it.”
_Five Full Days_ was ridiculed as “soap opera” in disguise. What’s wrong with soap operas? the term is one of contempt for things of concern to women and women’s art. I did not go on from Prime Suspect Scent of Darkness because the net one at Netflix has a long wait and when I tried the story after that I realized I had missed something. What happened to Patrick (Stuart Wilson_. The series does quietly trace Jane Tennison’s life from 1 through the last. E.M.
Michael wrote: “Now the memories come flooding back. Touching Evil — one of the best crime series I have watched; again so grim you almost need to consume an alcoholic beverage to cope. A brain-damaged detective, cops who brutalize and drive suspects to suicide, the detective’s family sent into a protection program such that he’ll never see wife/kids again … yowza. Could I have a quaalude with that? And another Robson Green jewel, Wire in the Blood, which is saved by the actors from some of the near-terminal melodrama of the original novels.
I was reminded because I was just listening on BBC radio to a replay of an interview of Val McDiarmid, the author of Wire in the Blood and assorted other vicious crime novels. Her speciality apparently is the torture-maim school of psycho-killers. Not a terrible writer but she tends to get turgid in the clinches. Since she’s made millions of pounds from her books, I’ll not get too snooty. ;-)”
I’m not into mysteries that much — though I like some essays on them. They have to have serious social or political content (like LeCarre or Red Riding — I lived in the West Riding, as Leeds is located there in Yorkshire and there is a South and East Riding too, no North) or be a woman’s novel in effect transformed to appear to be a police procedural. New content for formulaic male bottles.
E.M.
Michael wrote: “Many years ago, I came across Edmund Wilson’s famous essay ridiculing the reading of mystery novels and because incensed by his “elitist” attitude. So, I decided to do my own study of the best mystery novels to debunk him. Instead, I ended up agreeing with him. ;-( I tend to not like genre novels that pretend to be “serious literature,” as they are like chickens without wings. Why I don’t like PD James, whom I find insufferably pretentious.
You can find genre novels that treat serious issues without veering into the claptrap jungle, but it is only when they are pure melodrama, I think. Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River is a good example. The real core of this story centers around loyalty but it is never discussed. It simply lies under the overt action of the hunt for a murderer. I also like very much Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels; she brilliantly manages to get you to keep reading novels about one of the most self-centered, inconsiderate and frequently downright bitchy characters I’ve ever encountered. You can read a long way into the series before you realize that, as with the narrator of Ford’s The Good Soldier, the world as interpreted through the eyes of V.I. isn’t necessarily the world as it actually exists. Maybe the best usage of first-person narrative that I’ve read.”
I seem to remember we’ve talked about this before. I have no expertise in mysteries — or any genre or pop literature. I hardly ever read science fiction. But I have liked a few mysteries where I thought the author was using the genre to make good (=ethical, political, serious, important &c&c) statements (for lack of a better word). One of these is LeCarre; his first book is really fine (Small Town in Germany) and less of a mystery than the ones that followed. It’s an easy plot-device, the mystery and you find it’s combined with other types: so Dickens uses it. And (I guess I’m just repeating) I like woman-centered mysteries when they are well done: with female heroes or heroines. Maueen Corrigan has a fine couple of chapters on some of these in her _Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading_ and I’ve read a couple of other essays on this kind of woman’s book but the author and title are too vague for me to find them. Amy Rennert’s _Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect, A Celebration_ is pop but still pretty good and it has marvelous photos of her across her career.
E.M.
The Long Good Friday is a fine thriller with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren as a London mobster and his moll. It was Hoskins’ break-out role. Includes a then-unknown actor named Pierce Brosnan in an uncredited walkon role lasting about 2 minutes or so. It’s a very unsettling movie. One of the underlying themes is the rules by which violent people play, even though it seems to outsiders like they have no rules. And what happens when those rules are violated.
Mike
Yes I started that one and never finished it. Meaning I got too tired and then after a while returned it. I did like it. Hoskins is a great actor; when he was young he played one of these Renaissance scary roles against Mirren as a chaste woman who has gone wild (_Changeling_). She has a long illustrious career, but probably The Longest Friday starts these hard roles. I’ll never forget her in the The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. In Rennert’s book she suggests that movie was a turning pt in Mirren’s career in that it brought a lot of attention to her as a hard yet anguished character.
Ellen
[…] 4th story (Season 4) is the first of three 2 hour films and given a title: “Lost Child.” In this one she has an abortion, the result of her love affair in Story 3. It’s also the […]
[…] the first half I was almost unbearably moved. More than in “Scent of Darkness” (where Mirren as Jane’s affair with Stuart Wilson as Patrick is made nearly as important as […]
[…] She has become the lover of one man early in the film and he remains a confidant. We are told in a series of intertitles at the end of the film how all we have seen is real (just souped up for drama), how the real Kathryn now lives with Jan in the Netherlands. Apparently it was not safe to return to the US or Jan, this man’s name, was Dutch and wanted to stay in the Netherlands. A small part of the ammunition against Kathryn (this is interesting as it shows this kind of loss of reputation does not count as much as women might fear at least in this case) is her private life. She lives freely and has lovers. Goes to bars herself. But as an upper class (it’s understood in context) white American woman. In one interview a superior tries to needle her about a second story the movie opens with: her ex-husband has custody of her daughter. She was deemed less fit than he; he made more money; he could provide a conventional home with a stay-at-home wife/mother. She lives in another state from him and one motive for going to Bosnia was the larger salary which could enable her to move back near her daughter. We see her job get in the way of keeping promises to her daughter to go to this or that occasion. So her story includes separation from her daughter and loss and one motive for her wanting to help Raya is she identifies with Raya’s mother (she says “I keep seeing Raya’s mother”). She also is enacting the mother she did not in US circumstances. This is parallel with Mirren who has had abortions and tries to be a mother where her job and wider usefulness and the life she wanted to lead would not permit her to have a baby, especially without a husband, a kind of relationship Jane did not really want. […]