The narrow road to the deep North Review – TV extremely powerful | Television

THere is an overwhelming darkness of the narrow road to the deep north, the adaptation of Justin Kurzel of the winning novel of the Booker Prize by Richard Flanagan. Theatically, this is to be expected: it is a group of Australian prisoners of war building the railway of Burma in the mid -1940s, at the end of the Second World War. This is the lasting trauma of conflict and imprisonment. He extends over half a century, and although he feels his darkness with a rich love story, she is largely violent, fatalistic and painful. But visually too, you can find yourself playing with the contrast and light settings. It suits his mood a lot to his palette.

Jacob Elardi is perfectly beautiful and haunted as a young Dorrigo, a doctor who loves poetry who is about to be married to the easy Ella and socially connected (Olivia Dejonge). The show covers three deadlines, two of which follow each other. Elardi takes the main change, Dorrigo as a young man. It opens in the thick heat of the battle, entering the action directly. Young soldiers exchange beards with a gallows humor, while they are kidding and teasing, and putting bets on how long they think they will live. Their joke is interrupted by explosive mines, the victims already considerable, a few moments. The survivors are captured and put to work on the railway. It is infernal of the offer, a lively nightmare of torture and an impossible endurance story.

Forty-nine years later, towards the late 1980s, Ciarán Hinds was the oldest Dorrigo, a rich, rich and famous surgeon, still married to Ella (now played by Heather Mitchell). Dorrigo broods, even more haunted and undergoes a calculation with his own story. He is also celebrated as a war hero, but he is combative, arrogant, even reckless, in his professional and personal life. He gives a furious television interview, ostensibly on his war experiences, to promote a book, whose nature is deliberately abstruse. This applied reflection makes him remember what he tried so hard to forget and, as a drama, to switch between deadlines, he builds an image of what made him the unhappy and unfaithful man he has become. He slowly does it, convincingly and in great details.

The scenario of the 80s, in which the Dorrigo Philanderie Ways are bare, provide a respite from relentless violence. It is visceral, in its real sense. Kurzel captures the body horror of war in an almost frauvous way. As they hack the rocks and trees, men are emaciated, dirty, full of malaria and dysentery. The camera nestles among them and hovers above, transmitting a real sense of proximity and their suffering. At one point, one leg should be amputated. It is a bloody and trained test. At least, in the dark, it is partially obscured, although the audio alone is quite horrible.

For all its body horrors, it is also a passionate and full -bodied love story, a bit that is delicately balanced but just as impactful. Before being called, Dorrigo visits his uncle Keith (a small powerful performance by Simon Baker) and is immediately attracted by Keith’s young woman, Amy (Odessa Young). She is intrigued, if not impressed, but when they recover again during a poetry reading in a bookstore, after Dorrigo signed up in Ella, this initial spark ignites in a forest fire. It takes time for their mutual attraction to become more than desire and desire, the persistent looks and touches, but the pace of it moves and affects. Compared to the jungle grinding chaos, their business is sad and beautiful, as romantic as it is condemned.

It is a literary drama and that does not apologize for it. Dorrigo loves Catulle and Aeschyl. Men play Romeo and Juliet for each other in the jungle. Amy cements her attraction to Dorrigo with a fragment of sappho, which simply reads “you burn me”. Sometimes its romantic roots are more obviously exposed; Part of the dialogue is written and raised, because the characters poetically reflect human nature and cruelty.

And there is a lot of cruelty to consider. There are so many murders, so many dead and a particular execution, in the jungle, is one of the most painful scenes that I have watched on television for a long time. The narrow road to the deep north is therefore not an easy perspective, but it is extremely powerful, motivated by strong performance and massive confidence in its ability to tell this story, at its own pace. My only complaint is that I would have liked to see a little more.