"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

The Cloning of Joanna May: Part 1 (1992)

 
PC has been in a number of horror and horror-ish pieces.  He’s come up against vampiric snakes and wolf-boar-rat creatures.  House of 9 saw him as a pawn in a Most Dangerous Game-cum-Saw type of psychological torture, and in Fallen Angel he had a budding sociopath in his orbit.  But The Cloning of Joanna May deals with a very different sort of horror.
 
This two-part TV movie is about Joanna and Carl, two people who can’t get over one another despite a decade-long divorce.  Joanna’s private eye earns her living tailing Carl, and Carl sees that Joanna’s lovers meet bad ends.  Infatuation, spite, obsession, and jealousy fester in both of them, and they’re locked in an endless struggle for power over and ownership of each other.  The latest move is the most disturbing, the revelation that years ago, Carl stole some of Joanna’s genetic material, and his three “variations on Joanna” have been quietly coming of age out of sight.
 
PC plays Isaac, the man who originally serves as the catalyst for Joanna and Carl’s divorce.  A nebbish-but-passionate Egyptologist, Isaac works at a gallery owned by Carl.  He and Joanna form a connection that proves disastrous for both of them.
 
Isaac is in every way the anti-Carl.  Where Carl is large and commanding, Isaac is thin and good-tempered.  Where Carl is cold, Isaac is tender.  Where Carl hoards Joanna as his property, Isaac cherishes her like a treasure.
 
The always-reliable Brian Cox costars as Carl.  Additionally, Ian McNeice (Doctor Who’s Winston Churchill) has a featured role, as does a young James Purefoy, who I constantly confuse with James Frain and James D’Arcy but who made an excellent Tom Bertram in the Frances O’Connor version of Mansfield Park.
 
Accent Watch
 
Irish, but that’s being pretty generous.  The big clue is that he hits the R’s so hard, but it’s not Scottish or West Country; I sort of wound up at Irish on default.
 
Recommend?
 
In General – Maybe, if you like dark, psychological stuff.  PC’s not in part 2, but I’ll finish it anyway, to see how it turns out.
 
PC-wise – Not necessarily.  He’s only in a few scenes, and Isaac is very much a footnote in someone else’s story.
 
Warnings
 
Dark thematic elements, scenes of violence, and sexual content, including sex scenes and brief nudity.

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