Transatlantic (TV Miniseries)
Apr. 11th, 2023 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakBased not directly on history but on a historical novel, The Flight Portifolio by Julie Orringer, this is a new miniseries available on Netflix telling the story of Varian Fry and several of his co-workers in the Emergency Rescue Committee who between 1940 - 1941 saved more than 2000 refugees, mostly, though not exclusively, anti-Nazi artists, writers and intellectuals. As with most fictionalisations of rl events, some of the rl people didn't make the cut - in the series, the main rl characters other than Fry are Mary Jayne Gold, Albert Hirschmann (who is both himself and merged with another rl character who doesn't exist in this version, Gold's lover Raymond Couraud), Lisa Fittko and as the sole helpful instead of obstructive member of the US Consulate at Marseille,
Hiram Bingham. Whereas not only Couroud but Miriam Davenport don't show up. There are also fictional main characters: two ex-soldiers-turned-hotel-workers-turned-resistance fighters, Paul Kandidjo and his younger brother, Varian Fry's not-so-ex-boyfriend Thomas Lovegrove. Of the many, many famous people the ERC saved or tried to save, similarly while others are name dropped we only "meet" a tiny selection (which makes dramatic sense), to wit, Walter Benjamin, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Marcell Duchamps, Walter Mehring, and Marc Chagall.
(I was sad Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger as well as Heinrich and Nelly Mann didn't make the cut, or for that matter Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel, because them being saved is actually how I knew about Varian Fry, but like I said: I can understand the series limiting the cameos.)
Now I haven't read the original novel, though having watched the series, I googled and found out that when it got published in 2019, it providing Varian Fry with a (fictional) male lover was attacked in the New York Times, only for Fry's real life son to write to the NYT and say that yes, actually, his father did have (real life) male lovers. Here's an interview with the author, Julie Orringer, talking about why she made the choices she did, from the Paris Review. Not having read the novel in question, my own review is based strictly on the miniseries.
All in all, I liked it. All the characters the series picked to focus on engaged me, the actors were good - and it took me three or so episodes to finally realize where I'd seen the actor playing Varian Fry before: he played Edward Nygma/The Riddler in the tv series Gotham, which I'd seen the fisrt season of years ago, because I was so emersed in his performance as Fry. The miniseries goes for a found family vibe with Fry and his emerging team which it does pull off, and the female characters are not set decoration - in fact, Mary Jayne Gold is as much the lead as Fry is. (Lisa Fittko a bit less so in terms of screen time, but the miniseries does get across how amazing and heroic she was.) Mind you, Gold's storyline also contains what without doing much more than a bit of googling and thinking back to what I've read strikes me as the most blatant fictionalisation in order, if I have to guess, to give her more to do than "just" provide the money. To wit, an entire subplot where she's first cajoled into and then volunteers working for the British secret service; also, her father - whose money it is - cuts her off at the end of the first episode in order to make her return to the US, which based on what I know (and of course I could be wrong) did not happen in rl, where Mary Jayne Gold, not the (fictional) Thomas paid for Bel-Air, the villa where most of the refugees were stashed before Fry & Co. could get them out of the country. Now, the entire British secret service subplot struck me as the most obvious fictional element of the miniseries not because Mary Jayne gets to go on spying missions in it but because her first "mission" involves three British POWs.... who are interned at Camp Les Milles. When the show said this, my suspension of disbelief was abruptly broken, because Les Milles, where Feuchtwanger, Walter Hasenclever and a good many other German or Austrian refugees were interned for a while, wasn't, at least not as far as I know, a camp where a British POW would have ended up in in 1940. It was explicitly constructed for German-speaking (I'm phrasing it like this to incorporate the Austrians) "enemy aliens" who became "enemy aliens" when WWII started, never mind they were refugees from Hitler, were interned as such, and if they weren't released in time then in 1941 were handed over to the Nazis when the pretense of a "free" Southern France was over. I don't know where any Brits captured by Vichy France and/or the Nazis on French soil in 1940 would have been send to, but I'm guessing not Les Milles. I mean, I'm glad Les Milles shows up in the miniseries, it was an important and dangerous aspect of life at the time, but that it shows up as a POW camp instead of a camp for refugees really struck me as a cross between wanting to give Mary Jayne more to do and wanting to pay homage to English and US based war time fiction which involves POW breakouts of camps and daring spy escapades.
Otoh: very unsually for WWII era fiction aimed at the English speaking market, this one has its heroic Amerivcans (i.e. Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold) go with a distinctly uncomplimentary depiction of other US citizens and general US policy before the US entered the war. The US consul at Marsaille isn't just not helping, he's actively obstructing Fry (true enough). And more concerned for his financial future (he's repeatedly meeting with a representative of ACM who goes on about the importance of the German market) than about anything else, while the ministry back home isn't much more helpful, the plight of refugees is regarded as distatesful/actively threatening and isolationism is still the rage of the day. (Current day parallels do apply.) Similarly, the future French resistance fighters are the already exploited guys from the French colonies while we also get two recurring French collaborateur characters. Both we see in fact more of than the actual Nazis who show up in sinister cameos briefly but mostly provide off screen menace; it's the effect they have an the people whose lives they're busy destroying as well as the enablement of them the miniseries puts more focus on.
Romances: all fictional, though as mentioned earlier, Gold had one with a guy whose character's deeds get partly given to Albert Hirschmann, while Fry had them, just not with the fictional character he's with in this miniseries, and Lisa Fittko gets a blatant Casablanca homage by finding out her husband Hans is alive after having fallen in love with Paul in the belief Hans was dead. (Which is completely invented as well; Hans Fittko wasn't at Les Milles, either.) This said, I can see why the miniseries made these creative decisions, because this way, the romances happen within the circle of main characters whose fates we're concerned with instead of either happening in flashbacks (Fry) or not at all (Fittko) or with an additonal character (Gold), and they work within this fictional universe. Plus: the m/m couple gets more explicit kissing and making out than either of the two het couples!
Famous refugee cameos: doomed Walter Benjamin is poignant, young Hannah Arendt is how you want Hannah Arendt to come across, clever, sardonic but with a not always hidden pain and an unflinching look at the horror, Max Ernst is gloriously over the top (and so is Peggy Guggenheim), and Jonas Nay, who played the lead in Deutschland 83 (same producer) gets do do one of rl Mehring's biting caberet numbers while drunk and locked in a hotel room with some Nazis in other rooms in the same floor, which might be invented but feels like the kind of thing Mehring would have done. All of them are cameos, mind - the narrative focus is striclty on the rescue team who gets these people out (or not, the case of poor Benjamin) -, providing nonetheless an impressionistic kind of feeling about the pre-Nazi European culture currently in danger of getting annihilated. Oh, and everybody actually seems to be a native speaker of the language they're supposed to be a native speaker off, i.e. the French characters are played by French actors, the German and Austrian characters by German and Austrian actors, so when they occasionally talk in French or German to each other, it's not involuntarily comedic.
There's also a poignant sequence where Fry is confronted with refugee after refugee who wants help but isn't a writer/painter/musician and whom he thus can't help according to his original mandate. Going by the interview with the novelist I linked above, this plays a greater role in the novel where the fact that Fry keeps having to make choices whom to rescue and what that does with him is greater explored; the tv series gives us this sequence which in crystalized form shows just this, there's no good answer to such a question.
Aesthetics: feels like it was indeed filmed in Southern France (though the villa where the refugees lived for a while was destroyed in the 1970s, so they must have used another building), and the landscape beauty provides an effective contrast to the dark events. Otoh the female characters have the traditional talent of 1940s film characters of keeping their 1940s hair styles intact no matter the things they go through, but hey, we didn't mind it in Ingrid Bergman.
All in all: won't become the Casablanca of tv series, but is vey watchable and hopefully will introduce more people to some rl heroes who did consider it their business to help refugees in the darkest of times.
Hiram Bingham. Whereas not only Couroud but Miriam Davenport don't show up. There are also fictional main characters: two ex-soldiers-turned-hotel-workers-turned-resistance fighters, Paul Kandidjo and his younger brother, Varian Fry's not-so-ex-boyfriend Thomas Lovegrove. Of the many, many famous people the ERC saved or tried to save, similarly while others are name dropped we only "meet" a tiny selection (which makes dramatic sense), to wit, Walter Benjamin, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Marcell Duchamps, Walter Mehring, and Marc Chagall.
(I was sad Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger as well as Heinrich and Nelly Mann didn't make the cut, or for that matter Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel, because them being saved is actually how I knew about Varian Fry, but like I said: I can understand the series limiting the cameos.)
Now I haven't read the original novel, though having watched the series, I googled and found out that when it got published in 2019, it providing Varian Fry with a (fictional) male lover was attacked in the New York Times, only for Fry's real life son to write to the NYT and say that yes, actually, his father did have (real life) male lovers. Here's an interview with the author, Julie Orringer, talking about why she made the choices she did, from the Paris Review. Not having read the novel in question, my own review is based strictly on the miniseries.
All in all, I liked it. All the characters the series picked to focus on engaged me, the actors were good - and it took me three or so episodes to finally realize where I'd seen the actor playing Varian Fry before: he played Edward Nygma/The Riddler in the tv series Gotham, which I'd seen the fisrt season of years ago, because I was so emersed in his performance as Fry. The miniseries goes for a found family vibe with Fry and his emerging team which it does pull off, and the female characters are not set decoration - in fact, Mary Jayne Gold is as much the lead as Fry is. (Lisa Fittko a bit less so in terms of screen time, but the miniseries does get across how amazing and heroic she was.) Mind you, Gold's storyline also contains what without doing much more than a bit of googling and thinking back to what I've read strikes me as the most blatant fictionalisation in order, if I have to guess, to give her more to do than "just" provide the money. To wit, an entire subplot where she's first cajoled into and then volunteers working for the British secret service; also, her father - whose money it is - cuts her off at the end of the first episode in order to make her return to the US, which based on what I know (and of course I could be wrong) did not happen in rl, where Mary Jayne Gold, not the (fictional) Thomas paid for Bel-Air, the villa where most of the refugees were stashed before Fry & Co. could get them out of the country. Now, the entire British secret service subplot struck me as the most obvious fictional element of the miniseries not because Mary Jayne gets to go on spying missions in it but because her first "mission" involves three British POWs.... who are interned at Camp Les Milles. When the show said this, my suspension of disbelief was abruptly broken, because Les Milles, where Feuchtwanger, Walter Hasenclever and a good many other German or Austrian refugees were interned for a while, wasn't, at least not as far as I know, a camp where a British POW would have ended up in in 1940. It was explicitly constructed for German-speaking (I'm phrasing it like this to incorporate the Austrians) "enemy aliens" who became "enemy aliens" when WWII started, never mind they were refugees from Hitler, were interned as such, and if they weren't released in time then in 1941 were handed over to the Nazis when the pretense of a "free" Southern France was over. I don't know where any Brits captured by Vichy France and/or the Nazis on French soil in 1940 would have been send to, but I'm guessing not Les Milles. I mean, I'm glad Les Milles shows up in the miniseries, it was an important and dangerous aspect of life at the time, but that it shows up as a POW camp instead of a camp for refugees really struck me as a cross between wanting to give Mary Jayne more to do and wanting to pay homage to English and US based war time fiction which involves POW breakouts of camps and daring spy escapades.
Otoh: very unsually for WWII era fiction aimed at the English speaking market, this one has its heroic Amerivcans (i.e. Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold) go with a distinctly uncomplimentary depiction of other US citizens and general US policy before the US entered the war. The US consul at Marsaille isn't just not helping, he's actively obstructing Fry (true enough). And more concerned for his financial future (he's repeatedly meeting with a representative of ACM who goes on about the importance of the German market) than about anything else, while the ministry back home isn't much more helpful, the plight of refugees is regarded as distatesful/actively threatening and isolationism is still the rage of the day. (Current day parallels do apply.) Similarly, the future French resistance fighters are the already exploited guys from the French colonies while we also get two recurring French collaborateur characters. Both we see in fact more of than the actual Nazis who show up in sinister cameos briefly but mostly provide off screen menace; it's the effect they have an the people whose lives they're busy destroying as well as the enablement of them the miniseries puts more focus on.
Romances: all fictional, though as mentioned earlier, Gold had one with a guy whose character's deeds get partly given to Albert Hirschmann, while Fry had them, just not with the fictional character he's with in this miniseries, and Lisa Fittko gets a blatant Casablanca homage by finding out her husband Hans is alive after having fallen in love with Paul in the belief Hans was dead. (Which is completely invented as well; Hans Fittko wasn't at Les Milles, either.) This said, I can see why the miniseries made these creative decisions, because this way, the romances happen within the circle of main characters whose fates we're concerned with instead of either happening in flashbacks (Fry) or not at all (Fittko) or with an additonal character (Gold), and they work within this fictional universe. Plus: the m/m couple gets more explicit kissing and making out than either of the two het couples!
Famous refugee cameos: doomed Walter Benjamin is poignant, young Hannah Arendt is how you want Hannah Arendt to come across, clever, sardonic but with a not always hidden pain and an unflinching look at the horror, Max Ernst is gloriously over the top (and so is Peggy Guggenheim), and Jonas Nay, who played the lead in Deutschland 83 (same producer) gets do do one of rl Mehring's biting caberet numbers while drunk and locked in a hotel room with some Nazis in other rooms in the same floor, which might be invented but feels like the kind of thing Mehring would have done. All of them are cameos, mind - the narrative focus is striclty on the rescue team who gets these people out (or not, the case of poor Benjamin) -, providing nonetheless an impressionistic kind of feeling about the pre-Nazi European culture currently in danger of getting annihilated. Oh, and everybody actually seems to be a native speaker of the language they're supposed to be a native speaker off, i.e. the French characters are played by French actors, the German and Austrian characters by German and Austrian actors, so when they occasionally talk in French or German to each other, it's not involuntarily comedic.
There's also a poignant sequence where Fry is confronted with refugee after refugee who wants help but isn't a writer/painter/musician and whom he thus can't help according to his original mandate. Going by the interview with the novelist I linked above, this plays a greater role in the novel where the fact that Fry keeps having to make choices whom to rescue and what that does with him is greater explored; the tv series gives us this sequence which in crystalized form shows just this, there's no good answer to such a question.
Aesthetics: feels like it was indeed filmed in Southern France (though the villa where the refugees lived for a while was destroyed in the 1970s, so they must have used another building), and the landscape beauty provides an effective contrast to the dark events. Otoh the female characters have the traditional talent of 1940s film characters of keeping their 1940s hair styles intact no matter the things they go through, but hey, we didn't mind it in Ingrid Bergman.
All in all: won't become the Casablanca of tv series, but is vey watchable and hopefully will introduce more people to some rl heroes who did consider it their business to help refugees in the darkest of times.
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Date: 2023-04-11 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-12 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-12 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-12 06:36 am (UTC)I see that one has Miriam Davenport but not Mary Jayne Gold. Only one wealthy independent American woman supporting the cause allowed at a time? At least one review complaint didn't age well, to wit, apparantly the movie hints at Fry being not straight, too, and the review points to his two marriages and children as if no bisexual or gay man ever married and reproduced, calling this vile slander, as the NYT review to Orringer's novel would twenty years later. I can see why Fry's son at this point had enough and decided to not only postumously out his father but ask why presenting him as non-straight was considered a bad thing in the first place.
Marseille directly ruled by the German army sounds bad in terms of history, though. They were happy do let the Vichy-controlled French police forces do the dirty work of arresting and transporting refugees, which is accurately depicted in the miniseries.