Tag: Nancy Mitford

SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Pursuit of Love (July 30, Amazon Prime Video)

As the title suggests, this miniseries is about the amorous pursuits of heroine Linda Radlett (Lily James, “Downton Abbey,” “Cinderella”), but in Emily Mortimer’s adaptation of the 1945 Nancy Mitford novel it’s also about the love between two female friends and how they play the hand dealt them as women.

Over three episodes, cousins and best friends Linda and Fanny (Emily Beecham, “Into the Badlands”) move from post-World War I adolescence and juvenile delusions about love into marriage, childbearing and the disappointments of adulthood, culminating during the Second World War.

Linda is a passionate romantic who finds happiness outside the strictures of upper class society; Fanny is a more conventional soul frustrated by her inability to escape the bonds of her own propriety. The deep affection between them is tested by the different paths they pursue but never broken.

If that sounds overly serious, don’t fret. The show has plenty of moments of levity; enough period costume and decor porn to satisfy any historical drama aficionado, and a soundtrack punched up with 20th-century music, everything from Nina Simone and Marianne Faithfull to New Order and Sleater-Kinney.

Linda is the second eldest daughter of Matthew, Lord Alconleigh, a blustering bully of a man played by Dominic West (“The Affair,” “The Wire”) and modelled on Mitford’s own father; he keeps his children virtual prisoners and is vociferously opposed to women’s education and foreigners.

The educated Fanny was abandoned as a baby by her mother — known as the Bolter (played by Mortimer) for her habit of leaving successive husbands and fiances for greener pastures — and raised by her aunt Emily (Annabel Mullion).

Uncle Matthew and the Bolter, despite their flaws, provide some of the more droll moments in the series, along with the Radletts’ bohemian neighbour, Lord Merlin, played by Andrew Scott (“Fleabag,” “Sherlock”). The character is introduced in a delightfully anachronistic scene in which a pyjama-clad Merlin crashes a Radlett party surrounded by a louche posse of provocative companions dancing to “Dandy in the Underworld” by T. Rex.

Meeting Merlin is the beginning of the uneducated Linda’s crash course in what the wider world has to offer in a society in which marriage is considered the only respectable option for young women of her class.

For Linda, marriage also represents escape from her tyrannical father and stultifying country life, but she learns the hard way that marriage and the romantic love she cherishes above all don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Freddie Fox and James Frecheville play her husbands, and Assaad Bouab portrays her lover.

Fanny has the successful marriage but chafes at being a “sticker” as opposed to a bolter, wife of an Oxford don (Shazad Latif, “Star Trek: Discovery,” “Penny Dreadful”), relegated to taking care of the children instead of exercising her own intellect. 

Though “The Pursuit of Love” isn’t a bodice ripper like “Bridgerton,” it reminds me of that dramedy in the way its central female characters manoeuvre within an oppressive system. Linda tells Fanny, in a paraphrase of a Simone de Beauvoir quote, that women are born with their wings clipped “and then everyone’s so surprised when we don’t know how to fly.”

Mortimer, who wrote and directed as well as executive-produced “Pursuit,” isn’t heavy-handed in putting a modern feminist lens on the story, which is also full of joy and fun and whimsy, but we don’t lose sight of what Fanny and Linda are up against, either.

It ends with Aunt Emily looking ahead to a time when women might choose to “be more than just a bolter or a sticker, or a Linda or a Fanny, and decide who they are, irrespective of who they marry.”

Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away (July 27, 9 p.m., PBS)

In this documentary, an instalment of “American Masters,” revered blues guitarist Buddy Guy marvels that a boy who grew up picking cotton in Louisiana could go on to play the White House.

“You couldn’t even think of that, that couldn’t even cross your mind,” says Guy, who’s about to turn 85.

The doc makes clear that plenty of other people wouldn’t have believed it either when Guy got his start, leaving his Louisiana home for Chicago in 1957, chasing the music he’d heard played by heroes like Lightnin’ Hopkins, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Guitar Slim and T-Bone Walker.

It was in those Chicago clubs that Guy developed his distinctive, fiery style of playing and singing, which seems at odds with the soft-spoken man in the film, who says modestly, “I still don’t think I’m good enough to be a professional musician.”

In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-1960s, when Guy and other Black American blues men were promoted by white British musicians like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and the Rolling Stones, that Guy began to get some respect at home. Clapton and other admirers like John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr. and Kingfish pay tribute to Guy in the doc, which traces his journey from childhood in a poor, sharecropping family, falling in love with the sound of guitar and John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen,” to returning to Lettsworth in his 80s to have a street named after him.

Guy won his first Grammy in 1991, “the thrill of my life,” in his words. And he’s keen to pay his own homage to the greats who inspired him: “If it wasn’t for the Muddys, the T-Bones, the Lightnin’ Johnsons, I owe that credit to them,” he says.

If you don’t know much about Buddy Guy and the blues — or if you do and you’d like to revisit his life and career — you owe it to yourself to watch this show.

Love Is Blind: After the Altar (July 28, Netflix)

Netflix is dropping three new episodes of its 2020 reality sensation “Love Is Blind” that focus primarily on the two couples who made it out of the series with marriages.

If you were a fan of the original, you might be happy to catch up with Cameron and Lauren Hamilton, and Matt and Amber Barnett, as well as singles like Diamond Jack, Giannina Gibelli and Jessica Batten. If you weren’t, you might want to give this a miss.

Whereas the original episodes felt fresh with their premise of singles “dating” sight unseen, visually separated from the person on the other side of their “pod,” the new ones cover standard reality TV territory. There’s a staged event — a two-year anniversary party for the Hamiltons and the Barnetts — with a guest list primed to generate conflict.

For instance, Jessica is still persona non grata in Amber’s books for flirting with Matt after he and Amber got engaged, a stance that time seems to have hardened rather than softened. And then there are Giannina and Damian Powers, who did not get married but were still dating . . . except somebody forgot to tell that to the attractive “friend” whom Damian brings along to the party. I don’t care how big his biceps are now; I’d dump his ass if I was Giannina or the other woman, Francesca.

Anyway, you get the picture. If you’re a “Love Is Blind” completist, by all means enjoy.

Also coming to Netflix this week is “Tattoo Redo” (July 21), which is exactly what it sounds like: people who got bad tattoos getting them inked over but letting someone else choose the design. There’s also “Transformers: War for Cybertron: Kingdom” (July 29); the animated “Centaurworld” (July 30) and Season 2 of teen drama “Outer Banks” (July 30).

The Wedding of the Century (July 29, BritBox)

I was one of the millions of people who got up at some god-awful hour to watch the wedding of Charles and Diana live in 1981.

Looking back at the grand occasion now, 40 years later, feels not merely nostalgic but surreal.

Having avidly consumed “The Crown” as it dramatized the misery of the marriage in its most recent season makes the sight of Prince Charles and the former Lady Diana Spencer vowing to forsake all others “so long as you both shall live” feel like the real fiction. Watch Diana progressing up the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral in her voluminous dress with its 25-foot train and try not to think of the fictional Charles giving Camilla Parker Bowles a bracelet the night before his wedding (a story that’s partially true according to Cosmopolitan).

Best then to approach “The Wedding of the Century” as a look back at a moment in history, with which I doubt anyone can argue.

The doc says it was the biggest televised event ever at the time, with some 750 million people watching around the world — and that was before PVRs and streaming and YouTube — although Diana’s funeral just 16 years later surpassed it with an estimated 2 billion live viewers.

Two-thirds of the film consists of “I was there” accounts from people like royal photographer Kent Gavin, cake maker Dave Avery, choirmaster Barry Rose and florist David Longman, with context provided by historian Kate Williams (who was 6 when the wedding happened, just FYI).

The real treat if you’re a royal wedding watcher is the enhanced British Movietone Productions footage of the event, as well as glimpses of the nuptials of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.

NOTE: The times listed here are in Eastern Standard Time, and reflect information provided to me and cross-checked where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste.