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Primadonna
Reviews
May 33rd (2004)
Hypnotic, disturbing, brilliant
This extraordinary TV drama deserved more publicity and reviews. It is totally absorbing, beginning as the character attempts her escape from the life of abuse that is all she has known from childhood onwards.
This is the first drama I have ever seen about the phenomenon of dissociative identity disorder (DID), or multiple personality disorder. In the case of Ella Wilson, the character brilliantly played by Lia Williams, her mental problems stem from the cycle of brutal sexual abuse by a group of paedophiles, some of whom are relatives. When she visits an osteopath, Edward, his touch releases different personalities, and as he gradually understands the nature of the problem he intervenes to help her. But one of Ella's personalities is given to sudden acts of aggression, and Edward abruptly realizes his family may be at risk.
The immense problems suffered by a person with DID in finding anyone who will believe them, let alone help them, are agonizingly explored in this film. The acting, direction and camera work are superb, and Ella's repeated attempts at escaping from the cycle have a hypnotic effect. Not a happy film, but one to make you think for a long time afterwards.
Among Giants (1998)
A fake Sheffield for America?
Billed as a kind of sequel to The Full Monty, about unemployed men in Sheffield, this movie is a fake.
As someone born in Sheffield, and still with links to the city, I was extremely disappointed by this film. Someone said it could have been set in Oklahoma, and that just about sums it up for me. This looked like a romantic view of northern England made for the US market. Probably many Americans - and many southern English people - don't realize that Sheffield is a big city of around half a million inhabitants, with a sophisticated urban culture. In Among Giants it was depicted as some dreary dead-end semi-rural small town, where everyone in Sheffield seemed to drink in the same old-fashioned pub, and where the people's idea of a party was line-dancing in some village-hall lookalike. This was a small close-knit community, not a metropolitan city.
The working-class Sheffield men were totally unlike their real-life counterparts, who are generally taciturn and communicate with each other in grunts and brief dry remarks. They don't chatter, and they certainly don't sing in choirs.
Even the rural settings, supposedly in the Peak District, looked alien to me. I recognized a few places where I used to go hiking, but some of the aerial shots of pylons stretching out over a bleak landscape reminded me more of Wales. Indeed, in the credits at the end I spotted a reference to Gwynedd, Wales. The Peak District is, in the summer, crawling with walkers and tourists in cars. It is situated between two big cities. It is not some kind of wilderness.
As for the notion that a young woman could fall in love with, and lust after, Pete Postlethwaite, that was ludicrous, and could only have been a male dream. Her reasons for becoming his lover were never made apparent. None of the men was shown as having a partner or families; they existed in a vacuum.
Anyone wanting to see a film about unemployed Sheffielders would have been led astray. This Sheffield existed only in the minds of its middle-class writers and film-makers.
It was a gigantic fake!