Prior to each screening, Sky Atlantic kindly warns viewers that The Borgias may contain “violent and distressing scenes as well as scenes of a sexual nature”. Fair enough on the bonking and battering alert; an awful lot of throats are cut and hearts stabbed, while the average episode will net you at least four couplings, if no actual copulation. But ‘distressing’? Even the least discerning viewer will rapidly twig this is not a documentary about gender-based violence.
The real distress is for historians, still recovering from The Tudors and Rome, who will find much to quibble with, and for those who can’t believe Neil Jordan, producer and writer of this drivel has come to this. This is the same Neil Jordan who delivered Mona Lisa, flawed, but still magnificent, The Company of Wolves and Michael Collins. True, he also made the execrable In Dreams and High Spirits, but The Borgias ? It’s almost as shaming as something the other Jordan, our Katie Price,would put her name to. And he did it all in the name of art and history. From an interview with AssignmentX.com:
“Nobody can start a war without appealing to some god. Almost nobody. And I just think religion, and power, and politics, go hand in hand. One is a mask for the other. And it amazes me in a strange way how little the world has changed from the Borgia era to the present day. Tony Blair could not invade Iraq without an appeal to God, you know? And I think religion is the thing that will always be there, because people have this strange need for certainty, and nothing can destroy it for them”.
You don’t say, Neil.
If you have Sky (and I mainly don’t, honest…), The Borgias is worth visiting, but I would check out a youth hostel or honest B & B rather than spending your hard-earned ducats on a room at the papal palace. It’s all here: corruption, intrigue, incest, betrayal, beautiful opening sequences, delicious locations (Hungary, not Italy, but there you go), lots of nubile lovelies and…..Jeremy Irons, as the Pope, no less.
If you are going to turn up in this kind of twaddle, at least enjoy. Steven Berkoff has a high old time as Savonarola, but then again Berkoff has never agonized about the ‘crap factor’. He was in Rambo, for heaven’s sake. Jeremy actually looks pretty bored by proceedings, given dull lines about securing new territory for The Vatican and trying to supervise a difficult family unit. “We need the union more than we need riches... Perhaps it is time to strengthen our ties with our ancestral homeland”. We would all rather see him strengthening ties with the lubricious females on offer, particularly after his bedroom heroics in Damage with Juliette Binoche. Sadly, marriage to Mrs Borgia is not what it was. Joanne Whalley is predictably feisty as the Borgia mum and looks to be enjoying herself. Then again, if you’d been been married to Val Kilmer in real life and been shot dead in The Edge of Darkness, hanging out with the Borgias can’t be too demanding.
Of the newcomers, much has been made of Holliday Grainger, like Whalley, a Mancunian, but I find her pretty drippy, despite her fondness for a bit of rough. The young male Borgias all sound like posh young cockerels trying way too hard. Some of this feels like stumbling into a sixth form play, albeit with an 18 certificate. “I can neither read nor write”, says a humble spy, recruited by Cesare. This is difficult to believe, given that he sounds like he went to Harrow.
Emmies galore for all concerned, with American critics and gushing audiences apparently convinced they are watching another HBO gold-plated classic, helped on its way by spurious Jordan references to The Godfather. Rubbish to that too. Michael Corleone would have come down like a ton of bricks on a family that got on like this.
I speak with some bitterness, for I can remember all too fondly the original Borgias, not the 15th century bunch, but the hugely implausible, but always entertaining family that arrived in 1981, courtesy of an Anglo-Italian-Australian (?) co-production, announcing themselves with some clunky brass and a falcon, a title sequence that probably cost about fifty quid. There is, to my knowledge, no box set available, but you may get an occasional clip on YouTube, plucked from TV hell compilations. There is also royal biographer Sarah Bradfords's book (you guessed it, The Borgias), probably well down her CV. This gives some idea of the treasures on screen, but is hard-going. Here is Lucrezia contemplating her destiny: "Now, at long last, the revulsion she felt at the scenes of that night had brought to the surface her subconscious desire to escape from the passionate thraldom in which she had lived".
Back to the screen. Most critics gave up on it after the first episode, some asking spiky questions about the BBC’s involvement in this toxic Euro-pudding when Granada on the other side was giving the nation luxurious dollops of Brideshead Revisited. Some concern too for John Prebble, distinguished historian and authority on Scottish clans who was script-writer in chief. Thankfully, Clive James popped in from time to sympathise with the cast and to try (hilariously) to make sense of papal pronouncements and bedroom shenanigans. I watched every episode and the repeats and was delighted when a friend presented me with a quartet of downloaded DVDs close to thirty years after Cesare and his clan marched into Rome.
Alexander VI was played by Adolfo Celi, a highly distinguished actor and director in his native Italy, but best known on these shores for being James Bond’s adversary Emilio Largo in Thunderball. Later he was best known for moaning “God forgive me” as he mounted a protesting Lucrezia, “father, what are you doing?” Lucrezia was Anne-Louise Lambert, a young Aussie actress, brilliant in Picnic at Hanging Rock, but all at sea in Rome, having a rotten time in the bridal chamber and equally miserable as a nun. At least she escaped Home and Away. She later retrained as a psychotherapist.
If cast members were routinely humiliated, what of historical figures? I doubt whether Leonardo da Vinci, played by Malcolm Hayes, would have reckoned much to his five-minute cameo. He swirls around, looking like an old hippie, while the fabulously nasty Cesare, played by Oliver Cotton, pours bitter scorn on his talk of aviation. Machiavelli gets a little longer, watching bemused as Cesare fires his crossbow, the bolts ripping into criminals and vagrants in the square. “I think you’ve made your point”, the author of The Prince hints as Cesare’s tally goes up to four. But the would-be Lord of the Romagna zaps another two for good measure.
This Cesare made a point of killing sister’s husbands and boyfriends, saw off brother Juan, rowed endlessly with his father and was master of ceremonies at a pre-wedding orgy, where whores ran around on all fours picking up chestnuts with their mouths. He rarely let you down, nor did his enemies. Quizzed on whether he had received “letters from Cesare Borgia”, a rival warlord proclaimed with pride: “I wiped my backside with them”.
Much more recently, Cotton turned up as Michael Heseltine in a drama about Thatcher. But he was disappointingly subdued. How one wanted him to turn to Sir Geoffrey Howe and snarl: “be loyal to me Geoffrey, or I shall slit your belly and spill your guts”.
No comments:
Post a Comment