Desperate Romantics
Most Americans know next to nothing about the artists of history: Michelangelo, Da Vince, Warhol, Van Gogh, are perhaps best known for the movies or television documentaries made about their lives, rather than their actual work. But because artists (painters, sculptors, muralists) tend – as do artists of other stripes (actors, dancers, singers) – to be on the nutty side, they are good subjects for the written drama, especially British television.
DESPERATE ROMANTICS (2009) was shown on BBC/Britain and BBC/America. Now it is released on DVD. And it’s worth owning, if for nothing else, educating us on the mid-19th Century Pre-Raphaelites. The three young and highly-strung painters, called themselves The Brotherhood, as they flung the opprobrium of the traditionalists back into their faces, were eventually all accepted by the Royal Academy of Art and, thus, became Establishmentarians.
This six-part mini-series explores the formative early years, when The Brotherhood shocked Victorian London with their profligate ways: sleeping with their models, drinking and drugging most of their waking hours, and leading the staid Academy into acknowledging the seamier side of the Romantic Era in painting.
Using an invented character of Fred Walters, a hanger-on journalist (Sam Crane), the story explores the fortunes and mis-fortunes of the foursome, who include William Holman Hunt (Rafe Spall), John Millais (Samuel Barnett), the most famous of them at the time with his painting of Ophelia Drowning, and the most prolific of them, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Aidan Turner), who was also a poet. They all of them fall in love/lust with a variety of the models, especially red-haired Lizzie Siddal (Amy Manson) and the young and lusty prostitute, Annie Miller (Jennie Jacques). They were especially interesting to the possibly homosexual art critic, John Ruskin (the extraordinary Tom Hollander), who essentially made them famous. But his failed marriage (no sex after five years of marriage to Effie (Zoe Tapper)) led to an annulment and a subsequently successful marriage to the dapper and equally-pretty Millais.
Writer Peter Bowker has based his lusty screenplay on the work of co-creator and executive producer Franny Moyle (who gives an excellent explanation of the characters and their period as a part of the bonus material); it’s suitably gaudy, sexual and contemporary in its sound -- inaccurate, but accessible. The direction was split between Paul Gay and Diamuid Lawrence, but the episodes are seamless, so nothing is lost to errant interpretation. Except, perhaps, that Episode Five actually contains the only male nudity on display (Aiden Turner), whereas all the others have plenty of female disrobing (well, they were the models, weren’t they? No sexism or double-standard on display here, was there?).
If one is terribly interested in the Pre-Raphaelites and how they got to be famous, this is a painless way to learn what is useful. And be entertained by quality work all around.