This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 28 January 2017.
APPLE TREE YARD: Sunday, BBC One
THE CULT NEXT DOOR: Thursday, BBC Two
Tired
of all the usual Valentine’s Day platitudes? Then why not zing the strings of
your lover’s heart with a card declaring: “Sex with you is like being eaten by
a wolf”?
Call
me old-fashioned, but lupine evisceration doesn’t sound terribly sexy. Then
again, to the best of my recollection I’ve never been seduced by a handsome
civil servant in a crypt beneath the House of Commons.
That
unlikely setting is where our story began in APPLE TREE YARD, an uncomfortably uneven thriller starring Emily
Watson as Yvonne, a respectable genetic scientist, and Ben Chaplin as the
wolfish stranger who detonates her polite upper middle-class existence with a
series of thrilling sexual encounters in public places (including a café
bathroom conveniently bereft of other afternoon customers).
Middle-aged
Yvonne is unhappily married to a university lecturer (Scottish actor Mark
Bonnar, who’s cornered the market in instantly suspicious characters) who, or so
it would blatantly appear, has had an affair with a younger student.
After
delivering evidence to a Parliamentary select committee – erotically-charged
events at the best of times – she’s whisked off her sensibly-shoed feet by
Chaplin’s carnal politico. Suddenly she feels desirable again, and so embarks
on a risky affair.
Were
it not for some typically solid, nuanced work from Watson and a shocking final
scene, most of Apple Tree Yard’s
opening instalment would’ve come across as little more than an unusually
earnest Mills & Boon fantasy.
Granted,
it played a fairly diverting guessing game. It began in media res with a manacled Yvonne being led to the dock, so
something awful was bound to occur (it wouldn’t be much of a drama otherwise).
Like
Yvonne, we don’t know anything about her nameless seducer. Is he just a
harmless swinger, or something much darker? That wolf reference was already
risible, but was it also a heavy-handed allusion to his swanky sheep’s
clothing? So far at least, all of this turned out to be an effective piece of
misdirection.
Having
being led to assume that Chaplin’s character was the sole cause of Yvonne’s
foreshadowed demise, in the final scene she was viciously raped by a hitherto
inconsequential supporting character.
It’s
impossible to fully assess Apple Tree
Yard on the basis of one episode, especially in light of its horrific
denouement. Its borderline silly aspects may prove deliberate in hindsight,
there to lull scoffers into a false sense of security.
This
is the story of a woman being punished for daring to enjoy the sexual freedom
afforded to men. It’s the story of a rape victim.
If
handled carefully, it could prove far more indelible than its initial impression.
A
disturbing account of brainwashed incarceration was exposed in THE CULT NEXT DOOR, which told the true
story of three women who spent more than 30 years in a Brixton flat under the
tyrannical spell of an insane Maoist doomsday preacher.
Directed
with typically blunt delicacy by the documentarian Vanessa Engle – a film-maker
renowned for historical explorations of leftist politics - it allowed two of
Aravindan Balaksrishnan’s prisoners to speak for themselves.
One
of them, Katy, was born in captivity. Balakrishnan’s daughter, she’s a young
woman with the mental age of a ten-year-old.
Despite
finding shards of gallows humour within the rubble of its deadly serious subject
matter, Engle’s film mounted a sorrowful case against extremist political maniacs
who draw vulnerable people into their hermetic orbits.
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