What a great mini-series. I saw the three episodes one right after the other at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
At first I thought that maybe a big Hollywood movie production would have done a better job, but later into the mini-series I actually came to prefer this BBC production, it was a great way to look back at the years of Mr. Thatcher in England.
The Line of Beauty was adapted to screen from Alan Hollinghurst's Man Booker Prize winning novel. The novel is beautiful, I had read it a while a ago, and I think Andrew Davies did a nice job translating it to screen.
In The Line of Beauty, we are in the 80s' under Margaret Thatcher and we follow Dan Stevens' character getting sucked into the high life of a wealthy family, the family of his best friend from Cambridge, played by Oliver Coleman.
We had loads of gay content, including quite a few candid sex scenes involving the main characters.
Our main character was gay. Nick Guest (that's the name of Dan Stevens' character) was probably the sanest person in the whole story too, and I think that was the highlight for the gay content. Granted, he snorted cocaine, and I would have preferred he didn't of course, but I guess it was the 80s, there was a lot of money around him, and I think coke was really big back then.
Nick Guest's sexual orientation is known to everybody in the movie -- he was not afraid to flaunt it in many important social occasions, and most accepted his orientation with no problem, the ones who didn't were seen in a negative light. Yay!
You have got to see this one. You can catch The Line of Beauty on Logo or get the DVD here. You should definitely check it out.
I will talk a bit more about additional gay content in the mini-series but that will spoil some of the plot.
[SPOILER AHEAD]
We had lesbian content too. Nick Guest's first love interest is played by Don Gilet, and he gets Aids and dies. When Don's sister goes to deliver the news to our main gay, we learn she is a lesbian. Cute.
I'd been meaning to read the book for a long while now. Cool, I didn't know it had already been adapted for the screen. I'm adding it to my Netflix queue. (And given how long my queue is, I'll probably have time to read the book first!)
Posted by: Jeff | Oct 18, 2006 at 12:12 PM
It IS a great mini-series, Augusto, is it not? I watched it on TV just a few months ago, and right after the first episode I read the book. Both marvellous!
I'm rather glad you did like it!
All the best!
Posted by: RIC | Oct 18, 2006 at 08:40 AM
Andrew Davies adapted Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet for the BBC. It was fantastic and his adaptation of The Line of Beauty was always going to be infinitely better than anything Hollywood could dream of doing. xD
Posted by: Dan | Oct 18, 2006 at 05:11 AM