Fridays with Miss Fisher

Finding time – and the inclination – to maintain this blog is hard to come by.  A short post then.

Detective fiction is not a genre I am particularly enamoured with.  While Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle were staples for an Indian childhood, it wasn’t something I re-read into adulthood.  Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is pretty much in the cosies genre and its TV adaptation like with most cosies isn't always strong on plot. Yet it’s addictive Friday night viewing and mixes all the cosy elements right.  It doesn't hurt that it is immensely beautiful to look at and nicely performed. 

I bought a couple of the books to read along with the TV episodes and while the two differ greatly, in tone the TV series remains faithful to the novels for the large part.  Phryne Fisher is sort of a female James Bond, a pistol packing, exquisitely dressed, fabulously rich lady of somewhat easy virtue.  Like with all perpetually upstaging clever private investigators, you tire of her a bit (hands up if you find Holmes insufferable!).  But the books are on pretty good form in recreating 1920s Melbourne and obscure details of Australian history with a slant towards female emancipation.  And Greenwood creates vivid characters which helps the transfer to TV. In spite of this the books themselves feel a bit undercooked here and there,  there is an element of a first-rate concept all dressed up with nowhere to go. The writing is equally hit and miss with the opening chapters of Cocaine Blues being rather clumsy.   Though completely different in tone, the books reminded me of Amitav Ghosh’s novels.  A wealth of detail, a few interesting characters and yet swathes that are curiously shallow and one dimensional.

Anyway all the viewing and reading of history-mysteries reminded me that it was time to revisit my favourite detective of all time, DCS Foyle.  Foyle’s War, here I come!

What I Know about TV Dramas

I rarely watch sitcoms, soaps, TV dramas and the like. Not for any particular reason other than being scatty and impatient when it comes to anything that requires prolonged attention.  That and the direness of most of them. Sometimes though they come seeking you as in the case of the three serials that my father watches (the rest of the time luckily its just cricket and the news).  These occur in the time slot of 8-9:30 when simply being sociable and in the living room will result in deep knowledge of the tedious details of all three. This is particularly awful because even in the tedious world of TV, Indian TV achieves new depths of tediousness. 

Of the three, the serial my father is most devoted to is Jhansi Ki Rani. He assures me it was "very good in the beginning", in which case its deterioration is spectacular.  The only history in it lies in the barest details, the rest is wish fulfillment of a kind that is supremely absurd and surreal.  Today, for e.g. a shouting sort gave a speech on the besting of Queen V by the home grown version. One need not be a fan of Victoria to know that a Queen who presided over an empire cannot strictly be compared to a naive, albeit brave, Queen of a small Indian kingdom.  Other sorts preen and parade through this travesty. The Indians are always brave, the English are always rascals.  Horrifyingly some English folk are played by Indians in bad wigs and  white paint. Mysteriously some have a modern American twang. Its all about as accurate as a work by Frank Miller  - but stripped off his inventiveness and layered with the verbosity of Indian historicals.

This is followed by a soap so ludicrous that I can't be bothered to set down any details except to note the abundance of over dressed women and the abundance of very slow episodes.

Things get down scaled a bit in Pavitra Rishta, the kind of chawl drama that was popular way back when television was quite different. Beneath its updated facade beats the heart of the Indian social drama.-it is in fact based on a Tamil serial, Thirumati Selvam. I can understand how it might hook people in, its like an Indian Packed to the Rafters replete with actors from the 80s/90s in older roles.  But one tires fairly quickly, the novelty of a simpler soap wears off pretty fast.

At which point it all ends and normal programming resumes. Thankfully.

Romantics: Desperate and Otherwise

The ABC has just finished screening Desperate Romantics here. In the UK, it seems to have set off a mini Pre-Raphaelite revival with its apogee being a exhibition of their art during the London Olympics in 2012. The serial announces itself as "inventive" so of course it takes remarkable liberties with the lives of the artists (principally Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt), with a great emphasis on their sexual lives. But all in all it's impish, high spirited and good natured in tone and a great deal of fun to watch. And of course it's got people talking about the artists - though one may question if a revival is required after all. The Pre-Raphaelite manifesto may sound idealistic but the art itself is largely middling, though they were sort of the avant garde of the day.

My own knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelites before watching the series was ancillary at best. In an over heated phase of my life I read a great deal of poetry by Christina Rossetti (Promises still remains a favourite), of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems I had read only "The Blessed Damozel". I had seen many reproductions of Millais' Ophelia. And I knew a great deal about Ruskin, in part because he was one of the Mahatma's influences and a few decades back one paid more attention to the great man's reading list. As it happened, Ruskin was one of few portrayed in a rounded way in the series, helped along by Tom Hollander's portrayal.

I can't say that the series in any way prompted me to explore more of their work though I did find myself liking Millais' A Huguenot on Bartholomew Day and Rossetti's painting of Jane Morris (both below), the first intentionally medieval in tone, the second very much Victorian. As an aside, I have a feeling the Pre-Raphaelites were associated with the Artistic Dress Movement and the use of vegetable dyes, but the costumes in some paintings as well as in the series appear to be infleuenced by the brilliantly coloured synthetic dyes that followed the discovery of mauveine.

Both paintings have an element of kitsch to them. But both also suggest why kitsch/pop culture - whatever one may call it - is more likely to resonate and repeatedly find expression through the decades than high art. They both possess the "hook", something that reels us in ineffably even if the head is theorising otherwise.

The "inventiveness" of the series also extended to William Morris. I possess a book on the man and he is by all accounts nowhere close to the buffoon of the series. Morris' prints are in fact sublimely beautiful. They err neither on the side of excessive sentiment nor on the avant garde and edgy. Instead they possess a timeless, organic beauty. There is a seriousness to Morris' work and thought which is completely absent in his representation in the series and arguably his work has survived better than that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Then again, the series is a bit of a lark and nothing much should be read into it.

Lingering British Nostalgia

Thanks in part to ABC2, I have been having a bit of an overdose of period drama. First up was The Jewel in the Crown, which was sort of a TV event in the 80s, post which everyone went out and ploughed through the Raj Quartet. This time around I watched it intermittently. The episodes I watched raised a number of questions. Like, was Art Malik the first subcontinental type likely to appeal to all womanhood? Did he have a Japanese girl fan club? Is Judi Dench the new Peggy Ashcroft i.e. called upon to do duty whenever an old with acting chops is required? And whatever happened to Geraldine James, who looked crisply efficient even when snogging Charles Dance? IMBD of course has the answer. Is Saeed Jaffrey just plain annoying or a likeable ham? I am tending to the latter. How did we ever think Tim Piggott-Smith was "excellent" as Merrick? Must Englishman be allowed to pose as European types, accents and all? Answer: No. Will there be a film remake? Unlikely, the Raj has become boring on all fronts. But if they do, can Sendhil play Hari Kumar?! In a more serious vein, the series is a bit creaky in parts but holds up quite well. And it’s nice to see “India in the 80s” locales. But no subaltern deconstruction here, for that is even more boring and obsolete than the British Raj.

And now they are screening The Forsyte Saga. I didn’t plough through the book but a friend did, back in the 80s. I have a soft spot for it because while said friend fed me portions of the book, we were slowly moving towards falling in love (yes folks, the way to a literary girl’s heart is through - a book!). I don’t know how faithful the series is to the book but I will say this - while the author won a Nobel Prize, the TV series approximates a very pretty, overblown Edwardian soap opera. Cold fish Soames is married to pretty ice cube Irene who thaws when she meets dashing architect Bosinney. Architect dies. Edwardian hippie Jolyon, cast out by family no thanks to cousin Soames, then snags Irene. Soames and Jolyon feud. Have children. God, must we watch the children’s storylines too? Yes, you must, because everything and everyone is so – pretty. Galsworthy, the author, sets out to create the world’s most unsympathetic husband in Soames – rumour is he is based on the guy Mr. G was cuckolding. The friend who fed me portions of the book felt sorry for Soames. Watching the series I can only concur. It doesn't help that Damian Lewis, the actor playing Soames, plays him as a cold fish who is so inexplicably alluring that you expect Irene to discover the smouldering volcano behind that starched front followed by smackeroos all around. Or is that from another soap opera?

Watching period drama makes me think a bit about the books they are based on. Are these books now only popular in former British colonies? While Indian colleges presumably teach fusty classics left behind in 1947, has contemporary Britian itself moved on to Irvine Welsh and Jordan territory? Quite likely. On the other hand, they do keep churning out period adaptations from the nth Austen adaptation to obscure ones like Lark Rise to Candleford. So perhaps a certain kind of nostalgia for a British past remains in the UK and here. But what if ABC2’s habitual viewers are expats with an English education and local olds who collect royal memorabilia? Sobering thought!

Love My Way

Having heard a great many good things about Love My Way, I finally borrowed it from the video library. Not being the best with long running dramas, I managed to watch the three seasons over a period of time. This did not in any way deter me from enjoying the series, praise for which is well deserved. Its themes are fashionably gritty at times, the conflicts of its 30 something characters can sometimes be clichéd but the drama transcends this to achieve a somewhat poetic and ruminative quality. It is helped along by some marvellous performances by the main cast which functions together so well that it is hard to say which performance outshines the rest. And it captures a certain kind of Sydney, confined to life along the eastern suburbs, very well.

Love My Way Cast: From left: Brendan Cowell, Ben Mendelsohn, Claudia Karvan, Asher Keddie and Dan Wylie.

Normally I am never fully engaged emotionally with anything I watch. No matter how moved one is by a movie you realise once it is over that it is artifice and that you have been suspended for a length of time in a world that could plausibly exist but most emphatically does not. Few movies or dramas engage you enough to blur this distinction and oddly enough Love My Way, in spite of some TV soap elements, did. In fact its second series, which was pretty dark, left one with the distinct feeling of being dragged down till it ended on a positive note and brought you back up again. I think part of this comes from its writing which has been well thought out and makes for consistent characterisation. I cannot think of any other Australian product on television that comes close. It has never aired on free to air television here (it started life on Pay TV which has a smaller viewership) but perhaps it would not have been as good under its constraints. Die hard fans would probably want a fourth series but the three series in themselves are a sort of compact whole; essentially a time capsule of the lives of a bunch of affluent and bohemian Sydney 30 somethings in the first decade of the 21st century.

Watching Television

I don’t normally watch television staples i.e. the soaps and the sitcoms. Each episode turns up with clockwork precision on the appointed day and having to remember this is a little beyond me. The DVDs require too much time committment. Yet in the past few months I have broken the rule, for not one but four serials.

First, The Flight of the Conchords which combines lacklustre moments with genuinely funny ones. And of course there are the songs. And I can never get enough of Mel and Murray.

Second, Mad Men which proceeds at a glacial pace yet remains absolutely riveting on all levels. And while I am not off to get a Mad Men avatar, I have read all the reviews on Season 3 (even though we have yet to see Season 2 here). And I am quite sure a lot of people will now be reading Meditations in an Emergency.

Third and this I should not admit, Packed to the Rafters. Like every Australian soap around it is set in the suburbs, it is faintly daggy and plays on familiar themes. I have never watched the rest. Inexplicably I find myself drawn to the Rafters every Tuesday.

And fourth I have been lent all episodes of The Wire and been told it is a must watch.

That’s more telly in the past few months than in all my years here.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Mad Men is finally screening in Australia. It is pretty much everything the critics say it is. Most of all it looks to be brilliant, I was hooked from the first minute and in spite of my poor TV record, hope to catch the entirety of Season 1. And it is of course replete with retro fetishism, perhaps deliberately so. And yes scary Mel (Kristen Schaal, Flight of the Conchords) is also very briefly in it :-)

History of Predictive Text Swearing

Brilliant!

Armstrong and Miller deconstruct predictive text and its effects on swearing.

The Last Aztec

In my mundane life of the past few weeks, the odd bit of frisson came from watching The Last Aztec. It was a meandering, eccentric doco and rivetting in parts. DBC Pierre's idiosyncratic, garrulous and not to speak of drunk presentation and some kind of mad love for Mexico meant you watched the whole damn thing regardless of whether it was fact or grandiose, passionate assumptions. The title seemed sly - appearances notwithstanding, he may well be the Last Aztec.

Foux da Fa Fa

I have been planning a review of some of the nouvelle vague movies I saw at GoMA, hopefully at least a few will get done this month.

In the meantime, beginners' French from Bret and Jemaine. With sub-saturated colours it could well have featured in a parody of Love Songs :-)