The praise that ‘El cuento de la criada’ (‘The Handmaid’s Tale’), the Hulu television series broadcast in Spain on HBO Max, has received is incessant. And it is not for less: this feminist parable in terrifying dystopia format (because of how familiar it feels) does an extraordinary job adapting the novel from Margaret Atwood of 1985 faithfully and coherently with the television format.
What is not so well known is that the book was already adapted into a 1990 film, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (‘The Handmaid’s Tale’), with great ambition but very limited impact. The feature film, although faithful to the letter and to the story, had no choice but to compress into an hour and a half a very complex narrative based primarily on the protagonist’s impressions. The result is valuable as a complement to the bookbut limps in essential aspects.
‘The Maiden’s Tale’, both the book and its two adaptations (and the opera that was performed in the year 2000!) have a common plot: in the near future, the United States becomes a theocentric government due to the plummeting of the fertility. Using (men, of course) the divine will as an excuse, it is decided that fertile women conceive babies for high government officials.
those women are the maidens or servants. One of those maidens is our protagonist and through her experiences and memories we will discover this new world that has taken away from women the power of decision over their bodiesin a clear totalitarian symbolism on civil and sexual rights.
A troubled adaptation
The project started almost from the very publication of the novel, as soon as it became a bestseller. And also from the beginning it was marked by problems. In 1986, Atwood sold the rights to daniel wilsonwho already planned to participate in the adaptation of Harold Pinter as a screenwriter, and Karel Reisz as director. I would be a prestigious filmaway from a Hollywood-style orientation.
Harold pinter, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, is a prestigious playwright and screenwriter. Among his most important plays are ‘The birthday party’, ‘Return home’ or ‘Treason’, and among his scripts -often adapting other people’s works-, ‘The servant’, ‘The messenger’, ‘What remains of the day’ or the 1997 version of ‘Lolita’ (he reneged on the latter, demanding the withdrawal of his name from the credits).
Nor was the director initially planned for ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ short of prestige, Karel Reisz, one of the pioneers of the new realism of post-war British cinema and who had already collaborated with Pinter on ‘The French Lieutenant’s Wife’, nominated to five Oscars and starring Meryl Streep. Even so, they were walking the script without success for two and a half yearswithout finding ways to produce it.
After receiving responses from executives, according to The Atlantic, such as “a film for and about women… you’ll be lucky if it goes straight to video“, Reisz abandoned the project. But Sigourney Weaver, then at the height of her success, became interested in in the project, which attracted the director Volker Schlondorffauthor of prestigious films such as ‘The Rebel’, ‘Katharina Blum’s Lost Honor’ and, above all, ‘The Tin Drum’.
Weaver left the project when (maximum irony) she became pregnant, and this one, after a long search for protagonists scared by the militant feminism of the script, ended up finding a heroine in the British Natasha Richardson. Because of her combative family background (her mother was the very activist Vanessa Redgrave) she wasn’t scared of the subtext of the story.
‘The Maiden’s Tale’, great actors for a failed dystopia
Richardson’s interpretation was highly criticized in its day, in line with the major but that was put on ‘The Maiden’s Tale’: there was talk that this dystopia was too cold, too distant (like its actors) to be effective. It is true in part, but at the same time it is a misinterpretation of the film’s true achievements.
It is true that Offred’s reaction (or Offred in English, or Kate, as a protagonist who has no name in the novel is actually called) is surprisingly calm with respect to all the chaos that breaks out around her, to the point that sometimes seems to be singularly dehumanized. In the novel it is said that she is drugged at the beginning, and her internal monologue helps to understand, later, that his suffering finds no way to be expressed.
But this cold atmosphere gives a very special tone to the film, since Richardson manages to endow his Kate with humanity with very few resources and in a way that contrasts with the coldness of Serena, the Commander’s wife, a Faye Dunaway more mature than that of the television adaptation, and also more calculating and vindictive. Because here the enemies of women are the women themselves.
Not only is the Commander’s Wife a nostalgic and spiteful harpy: the Aunts (the women who educate the future maids through torture and punishment) are also portrayed as true sadistsin a way that is more nuanced in the series, where the women who control and brainwash other women are part of a shadow system controlled by men, not some kind of insane matriarchy.
And those abusive female figures contrast with the presence of the Commander, a mature Robert Duvall -in contrast to the attractive Joseph Fiennes of the series, but more akin to the character in the novel- who amuses himself by seducing and cajoling the Maid. The behavior usually reserved for villains (sinuous, seductive, maleficent in the shadows) it is awarded here to a man, which is both intelligent and subversive.
Where the film limps the most is in its portrayal of the future dystopia. Perhaps it is the time, perhaps the visual modesty of a film that openly renounces spectacularity, but the need to focus on the characters forces Schlondorff to neglect the portrait of the future, of which only a few brushstrokes are given. All this makes it difficult to understand the behavior of some characters.
Even so, Schlondorff indulges in some brilliant visual experimentation, for example in the red costumes of the maids, very influential in the aesthetics of the television series (which draws even more from the style of primitive religious communities in the United States). or in Effred’s rape scene, more grotesque and cold than in the TV series and therefore, in its own way, more impressive.
A story that took time to find its place
The film, ignored by the public, was a considerable flop: it raised only 5 million dollars compared to the 13 it had cost. Viewed today, it’s nothing strange: it’s a failed film and it he is not even brave in the groundbreaking of his proposal. For example, the unfortunate affair with the Commander’s chauffeur (Aidan Quinn) is a resource for a last-minute salvage that contradicts the feminist message of the parable
In the same way, Pinter’s well-known phobia of introducing voice-overs into his scripts underscores, on the one hand, that welcome cold tone of the film. But on the other hand, removes one of the most powerful elements of the original book: Offred’s flow of thoughts and a series of essential disquisitions for the story’s discourse, like everything related to the protagonist’s body.
The passage of time, however, has partially revalued this ‘The Maiden’s Tale’: for a time it was considered cult film (VHS copies were priced at more than 100 euros on Amazon) and now it’s beginning to be reviewed, with the novel conveniently recovered by new generations of readers thanks to the television adaptation.
In the end, the problem of ‘The Maiden’s Tale’ comes from the predominantly male view that it offers: not in vain those responsible for the film are two men -director and screenwriter-. And they decided that, as is clear from looking at the horrendous cover (the variants are very similar, with Richardson in more or less modest poses), ‘The Maiden’s Tale’ I was in a love triangleand the future already such.
The television adaptation can be hit hard, but at least the focus is right: Atwood herself, accompanied by the lead actress, Elisabeth Moss, are producers. They are accompanied by Reed Morano, also the director of the pilot. Together they have decided that ‘The Maiden’s Tale’ is more than a dystopia about men who cannot procreate. And that little detail is the one that didn’t work in this curious, isolated and almost forgotten Volker Schlondorff film.
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