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Following his darkly erotic, but highly attractive and
approachable BBC film, The Tribe, Stephen Poliakoff created another
gem in this three-part BBC2 drama. With little fanfare, it appeared
immediately after the Christmas schedules and quickly captivated its
audience.
An American businessman, Christopher Anderson (played by
Liam Cunningham, who was also in the 1996 film, Jude, with Kate
Winslett), is driven by something in his past of which he had no conscious
memory. He arrives in London intent on founding a new, state-of-the-art
business school with a revolutionary teaching method. He finds the site he
wants, but it is occupied by a very old photographic collection, one of
the biggest collections in the world, holding literally thousands of
pictures shot since the start of photography in the 1830s, about 93% of
them in black and white. The collection's curator, Marilyn, (Lindsay
Duncan), and the four assistants (including Timothy Spall, Emily Fox and
Billie Whitelaw), are all a little withdrawn from the real world, all
thoroughly involved in the collection.
Apart from the upkeep of such a vast collection, they are
also charged with renting out photos for specific marketing or media
needs, or drawing together separate threads, photos taken at different
times and in different places, but featuring the same person over several
years of their life. They put these photos together, recreate the life,
and finish the story that these photos tell. One such absorbing series of
photos tells the tale of a young Jewish girl in Nazi Germany, whose
parents allowed her to be adopted into a German family, so that she won't
face the perils of her own race at that time. The photos depict her last
meeting with her real Mother, a secret day trip with her Father, getting
lost, and appearing at different places in the city. And then of the same
girl, in London, 60-odd years later, very much changed by her life. It's a
very haunting story, with an all-too realistic end. However, Anderson
refuses to be moved by it, and, apart from buying the most important
pictures in the collection, is not interested in saving the rest. That's
where the obsessive Oswald (Spall) comes in. He persuades Anderson to show
him a picture of the American's mother. Oswald's unusual thought processes
lock the image in his mind and he begins a search for other pictures
relating to Anderson's mother or grandmother. But time for the collection
is fast running out as Marilyn vainly searches for a buyer, desperate not
to split up the photos. Oswald realises that, to make a point to Anderson,
to give urgency to the situation in which Marilyn must show Anderson the
photos he has singled out, he must make a dramatic gesture, something that
will bring home the true urgency of the situation. And therein lies the
programme's dramatic and totally enthralling finale, as Marilyn weaves the
true life facts of Anderson's grandmother around a montage of photos,
revealing a side to his family that Anderson was not previously aware of,
but which seems to make sense. But will he save the collection?
Spall's infuriating, bolshie expert headed a
scintillating cast, as Poliakoff set up the opposing arguments over value
and profit, culture and business in the library's atmospheric setting.
Filmed at Ham House, near Hampton Court, it was a drama of ideas delivered
by fully formed characters both among the buttoned-down businessmen and
the eccentric library staff. In the background were the photographs, not
relics of the past, but powerful images that told some extraordinary human
stories. Beautiful, insistent music served to highlight the mystery behind
the photos, and added a final, haunting sheen to a highly professional,
thoughtful, intelligent drama. Such a rare commodity in the late 1990s.
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