10 ways to deal with the past from the series – Weekend – Kommersant
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to make fun of
“Year of the Rabbit”
UK, 2019
In Victorian London, you can buy a bottle of local fog for a penny, the Elephant Man runs a freak circus, and a police inspector gives his underlings a master class “how to get opium out of sailors’ asses.” The Ripper is also on the alert – dead girls are found in Whitechapel, but a non-drinking guy cannot be found for the post of constable, so the “first constable of London”, broken by Mabel, is hired by the police. The British sitcom makes fun of favorite Victorian motifs in the most mocking way, but real tenderness is felt behind the scoffing – the Victorian period has not gone out of fashion on TV for more than a decade, even cry over it, even laugh.
Watch: Okko
idealize
“Downton Abbey”
UK, 2010–2015
The action of the reference costume series begins with the news of the Titanic disaster in 1912, passes through the First World War and ends in 1926. All this time, it is inhabited by beautiful noble aristocrats who do not lose their dignity in any circumstances, be it a war, an uprising in Ireland or protests of suffragettes. Stately tea parties, sly, dignified old women with pursed lips, devoted butlers adhering to the established way of life – the series depicts “good old England”, given to us in imagination and never really existed. Only by the final season, as if recollecting himself, screenwriter Julian Fellows admits that the old aristocracy has outlived its usefulness and – oh horror! It’s time to fire the butler.
Watch: ivi
frighten
“Life on Mars”
UK, 2006–2007
A Manchester cop in a prosperous 2006 is hit by a car, and as a result of some kind of temporary anomaly, he finds himself in his hometown during his childhood – in 1973. A police station in the mossy 1970s is a place where cops beat prisoners, plant evidence, and barge in on suspects without a warrant. And the only female colleague is arrogantly bullied and obscene jokes are allowed against her – not like the new politically correct times. The hitman has to roll up his sleeves and start teaching his colleagues not to lose the shore. Although the past here is quite recent, dense and medieval customs reign in it – I want to quickly shake off this dust from my fashionable progressive soles.
gossip
“Crown”
UK, 2016–
The closer the soap opera about the British royal family gets to modern times, the more it allows itself to retell old gossip about what the Windsors were and were not guilty of in the last forty years. Prince Charles did not appreciate and bullied Diana, intrigued against her mother, who “stayed too long on the throne”, and she strove to get into the pockets of taxpayers to fix her beloved yacht. For the honor of the Windsors, John Major and Judi Dench even had to stand up, who urged Netflix to hang a die on every episode that all this is fiction of the scriptwriters.
misinterpret
“Catherine the Great”
UK, 2019
If the heroes of The Crown are still alive, though not all of them, then you can safely tell any stories about the crazy Russian Empress – there is no one to pull up the impudent screenwriters. Therefore, Catherine the Second (Helen Mirren) is busy in the series not managing a giant country, but life-long tricks with Potemkin. At the same time, for the British, all Potemkins look the same: let Pavel Sergeevich, and not Grigory Alexandrovich, participate in the capture of the rebel Pugachev, but what the hell is the difference? It was a long time ago, and who will sort them out there – in addition to the country-specific “spreading cranberries”, the series proudly demonstrates at the same time the historical one.
correct progressively
“Bridgertons”
USA, 2020–
As a social experiment, the creators of the series decided to implant a “new ethics” and feminist optics into the costume melodrama. Somewhere this approach worked: for example, a girl of marriageable age who does not want to get married in 1816, in her right, because she behaves exactly like Emma from Jane Austen’s novel. And the dark skin color of the wife of George the Third, Queen Charlotte, is not a question: among her ancestors was the favorite of the Portuguese king with Moorish blood. But in the end, the creators of the series, who made the young ladies of the Regency era behave like the heroines of “Sex and the City”, still overdid it. Correcting the past, they failed to win the love of feminists – they still accused them of “romanticizing a toxic relationship.”
emancipate
“Outlander”
USA—UK, 2014–
After the Second World War, a desperate British nurse who visited the front one day accidentally wanders into a clearing of druids and falls straight into Scotland in 1743, where local patriots are plotting against English rule. But the Jacobite uprising is childish in comparison with the way an emancipated woman of not timid tenure rules their mossy morals for herself. Having married a hot mountain man in a plaid skirt, she trains him to fulfill his marital duty in a way that will please her – and he obeys. Fantasy, of course, but what a hot one.
Watch: ivi
investigate like a detective
“Modern Ripper”
UK, 2009–2013
One of the worst criminals in history, Jack the Ripper, who slaughtered fallen women in Whitechapel during the Victorian era, was never caught in his day. But at that time the police did not have the current technical means and scientific methods of investigation. What if there were? – the screenwriters decided and launched modern detectives on the trail of the Ripper, or rather his imitator, accurately reproducing historical murders. Here it turned out that neither security cameras, nor fingerprints, nor DNA analyzes can change the legend, and it is possible to reveal the crime of the past only with the help of quick wits and luck. Apparently, the conclusion follows from this that progress by progress, in fact, times do not change.
try to get along
“Aliens from the Past”
Norway, 2019
Due to a natural disaster in the Oslo Fjord, people from other eras emerge in our time – Vikings, cavemen from the Paleolithic and the ubiquitous Victorians. Advanced Norwegians, living in a society of universal prosperity, are trying to introduce uninvited guests to civilization – but it doesn’t work out very well: try to force the Viking not to drink and not to fight. Under the guise of fantasy retro, the series absolutely politically incorrectly ridicules the tolerant attitude of prosperous Scandinavians towards recent African and Middle Eastern refugees – well, they don’t want to assimilate, even crack. At the same time, they make fun of the Vikingsploitation, which captured pop culture along with a passion for everything Victorian. There is also a Jack the Ripper here, and his main secret is solved: he was never caught simply because he knew how to travel in time.
Watch: “Amediateka”
explain by supernatural causes
“Karamora”
Russia, 2022
The Russian anarchist Karamora, the leader of the combat detachment of bombers, loses all his comrades-in-arms in a fight with a chthonic monster. Apparently, it symbolizes autocracy: the main script idea of the series is that the old European and Russian aristocracy, including representatives of royal families, consists entirely of vampires. In the meantime, a cultural renaissance reigns in Petersburg living rooms: young Chaliapin and Mayakovsky sing and recite, representing the other side of the ugly Russian life. Anarchists do not give up: the past is cruel, the present is foggy, and the root of evil is beyond the rational – but the patriots of the motherland have silver bullets and a special path.
Watch: “Kinopoisk”
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