Product Description
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Sebastian Faulks' epic love story, set against a backdrop of the
First World War, became a modern classic when it was published in
1993. Now adapted for the screen for the first time, Abi Morgan
has created a riveting, sumptuous masterpiece. Shifting in time
between 1910 and 1916, Birdsong is the story of Stephen Wraysford
(Eddie Redmayne, My Week with Marilyn), a young Englishman who
arrives in Amiens in Northern France to stay with the Azaire
family and falls desperately in love with Isabelle Azaire
(Clemence Poesy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). They
begin an illicit and all-consuming affair, but the relationship
falters. Years later, Stephen finds himself serving on the
Western Front in the very area where he experienced his great
love. As he battles amidst the blood and gore of the trenches he
meets Jack Firebrace (Joseph Mawle, Game of Thrones), a tunneller
who unexpectedly helps him endure the ravages of war and enables
him to make peace with his feelings for Isabelle.
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Busy screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Hour, The Iron Lady) adapts
Sebastian Faulks's 1993 bestseller for this introspective
Masterpiece Classic two-parter, which reflects on love and war in
equal measure. Costume-drama veteran Eddie Redmayne (The Pillars
of the Earth) plays Stephen Wraysford, a British textile man
based in Amiens in 1910 (before his career skyrocketed, Michael
Fassbender was attached to the role). While staying with Isabelle
(Clémence Poésy, In Bruges) and her controlling husband, Stephen
falls in love with his hostess, but her marriage and stepchildren
stand in the way. The story continues to proceed along two
tracks: Stephen's time with Isabelle and her sympathetic sister,
Jeanne (Marie-Josée Croze), and his time as an imperiled
lieutenant in the trenches of World War I, where he finds a
friend in the selfless Jack (Joseph Mawle) and a foe in the
callous Captain Gray (Matthew Goode) as memories of Amiens spur
him on. If the peacetime scenes are light and
leisurely--sometimes too leisurely--the wartime scenes are dark
and tense as Stephen and his men crawl through tunnels, setting
off explosions. Flashbacks reveal that Isabelle eventually
returned his affection, except the course of their relationship
did not run smoothly. By the end, he's lost most of the things he
once desired, but an alternative path lies ahead. In this sense,
Birdsong bears some comparison with Atonement and Downton Abbey,
though the downbeat nature of the material won't be to all
tastes. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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Review
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The memory of love pierces the thunderous fog of war in Birdsong
(Sunday, PBS, check local listings), a wrenching new Masterpiece
Classic that covers some of the same historical territory as this
year's Downton Abbey the terrible toll of World War I but with a
grittier, less schmaltzy, more artful and erotic approach.
Based on the haunting 1993 novel by Sebastian Faulks, and adapted
by Abi Morgan (The Hour), this is the story of young Stephen
Wraysford (Eddie Redmayne, projecting the same sort of emotional
transparency he displayed in My Week With Marilyn), a British
officer on the front lines in Northern France who seems
perpetually lost in thought. "Funny how your head's here, but
your heart's always somewhere else," says a plainspoken "sewer
rat" (Joseph Mawle) whose job it is to burrow beneath No Man's
Land on the Western Front in treacherous tunnels, laying charges
under the German enemy. As Stephen's new assignment takes him
reluctantly underground, we retreat with him to a blessedly
peaceful summer six years earlier, in the French countryside not
far from the current shelling, replaying his encounter with the
woman who would change his life.
On first encounter with the unhappily married Isabelle (the
limpid, lovely Clemence Poesy), Stephen is shell-shocked with
longing and desire. The blossoming of their passionate, turbulent
romance provides poignant counterpoint to the numbing carnage of
war, with its horrific imagery of mud and blood hardening this
boy into an aloof leader described by others as a "cold one." If
they only knew. As the stories converge at the devastating battle
of the Somme, the same river where Stephen and Isabelle made
their first real connection during a pastoral boating excursion,
we wonder if anything can survive this tragedy. Birdsong is a
tearjerker with guts and soul. --Matt Roush, TV Guide
On Sunday, April 22, Masterpiece Theater debuts Birdsong, a
two-parter starring Eddie Redmayne ( My Week with Marilyn ) and
Clémence Poésy ( Harry Potter ). Adapted from Sebastian Faulks
popular 1993 novel by accled screenwriter Abi Morgan ( The
Hour, The Iron Lady ), it follows Stephen Wraysford, a young
English lieutenant whose war experience is framed by memories of
his affair with Isabelle, an unhappily married French woman,
years before. (It drops the novel s third plotline, set in the
1970s.)
Birdsong is the second and best novel in a loose trilogy set in
France during World War I (with The Girl at the Lion d Or and
Charlotte Gray, later filmed with Cate Blanchett). Faulks is
enamored with the romance of French life and his novels detail
the ity of the food, the simplicity of rustic living, and
the beauty of the land, even (or especially) as war threatens
this existence. This adaptation captures this, contrasting the
sunny, gossamer idyll of Stephen and Isabelle s pre-war
relationship (Redmayne and Poésy are quietly excellent) with the
dehumanized violence of the barren front.
As the horror of the trenches reflect his psyche, deadened by
Isabelle s sudden desertion, Stephen is filmed regularly in
forward motion, as if indicating the slipping away of a past and
a tranquil world no longer possible after such destruction. In
the final scene, when the camera pulls in on him, it feels like a
casting off of the emotional wreckage of the past and of the
claustrophobia of the trenches, a moment about the desire to
live, about a life, at last, in the present. --Kelley Kawano,
Word and Film
As a tapestry of time and place, "Birdsong" is a wonder to
behold. It begins in the trenches of northern France in 1916,
where British Lt. Stephen Wraysford (Eddie Redmayne) is facing a
task more frightening to him than any combat. Instead of going
"over the top," he and his infantrymen are headed below ground,
into the tunnels being dug close to German trenches so British
miners-turned-soldiers can lay charges and blow the enemy to
kingdom come.
Eventually these men will take part in the Battle of the Somme,
during which the British suffered some 350,000 casualties. Yet no
experience here is more ghastly than the tunnels, which flooding
or collapse can turn into a mass grave in an instant.
At night in his trench quarters, Stephen tells fortunes with a
deck of cards. But mostly he summons memories, escaping in his
mind to play and replay the summer of 1910, when he visited
France to stay with a wealthy textile manufacturer and fell in
love with the Frenchman's wife, Isabelle (Clémence Poésy).
Although it's a bittersweet, if predictable, story, the love
affair is not the strongest aspect of "Birdsong." The talented
Mr. Redmayne, who can convey emotions with only a twitch of a
facial muscle, will nonetheless not be everyone's idea of a
romantic lead. When Matthew Goode appears in the small role of a
British officer so lovely that he seems doomed for sure, it's
hard not to wish that he was the one with all the screen time.
Yet the role of Stephen calls for someone young enough to act on
his desire with impetuous energy before the age when men become
more calculating. So too, for dramatic purposes, he must begin
the war in innocence, as an idealist. This Mr. Redmayne's Stephen
convincingly is, though the most memorable character is an
innocent of another sort. That would be the miner-soldier Jack
Firebrace (Joseph Mawle). Jack is the British everyman who was
shoved into the maw of war. He's also a character out of D.H.
Lawrence, a simple man with uncanny instincts. Playing this
endangered animal, Mr. Mawle slowly breaks your heart.
Indeed, it is Jack who protects his lieutenant's soul and will
make you wonder, long after the curtain falls on "Birdsong," how
England might be different today if a generation of such men had
not perished in the mud of France and Flanders almost century
ago. --NANCY DEWOLF SMITH, Wall Street Journal
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