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Period pieces are really hard.
Done right, they are incredibly powerful because they demonstrate how random our prejudices are by showing plausible people with entirely different prejudices who still manage to be entirely human. Think, for example, of how Master and Commander made it seem not only fully real that a 12-year-old could lead men into battle but also completely natural within the film's world.
But tricks like that are very hard to pull off, and nearly every period piece falls into one of two opposing traps. Either they show people who act in ways that modern people cannot fathom — without conveying why they act like that — and thus make their characters seem wooden and fake. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, the characters speak and act in entirely modern ways that seem ridiculous to anyone with even the haziest memories of history class.
Lark Rise to Candleford falls into the latter category. Only one of the show's two dozen characters expresses any Christian faith whatever and all the other characters clearly think him a fool for it. (And he clearly is both a fool and a condescending hypocrite who doesn't understand anything about Christianity.) Men and women interact with absolute equality, at least among all the remotely sympathetic characters. Entire communities are just fine with obvious infidelity and basically everything else that would seem fine to a modern BBC exec but would, in actual history, horrify a Victorian yokel.
That's not to say it's the worst show on earth. To the contrary, it's likable enough, but it's no more an actual period piece that Monty Python's Life of Brian. If that's going to bother you, don't watch.
score 6/10
regtwisleton 4 August 2013
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2844756/ |
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9-10-2020 06:34:06