The audience targeted for contemporary movies and television still does not include me.
There's only a few that I can stand to watch for more than a minute or two - and the Romanoffs is one of them. It's visual and narrative density is captivating.
For example -- the above scene from "The Royal We" is nearly as spacious, colorful, and happily overblown as a ceiling by Tiepolo
While the design and color of this still - appearing near the end of the same story - perfectly captures the hopelessness and toxic creepiness of this character at this moment.
Which is why I find the mixed reviews of these films so dismaying.
I confess that I never view a streaming program straight through from beginning to end. I nibble -- as at a wedding buffet -- while intermittently paying attention to whatever else I'm doing. So I do not need to be enthralled for ninety straight minutes (this is also how I read a novel). But the overall narrative does concern me.
The last streaming series that fascinated me was "Transparent". I was grief stricken when Jeffrey Tampor was fired from the cast. So I do not dispute the many rave reviews that it received. But I would like to note that its transgender theme made it overtly politically correct -- while essentially, "The Romanoffs" is not. In every episode, one of the main characters is descended from a feudal aristocracy -- and the historical preface (the shooting of the royal family by the Bolsheviks) makes us at least a little sympathetic to their plight in the modern world.
It's not as if they are presented as any kind of positive role model -- far from it -- but the fact that each narrative is built around their lives cannot be ignored. We are led to care about what happens to them.
And, like fables for children or medieval morality plays, this narrative world make clear moral sense: good prospers and evil is punished. The characters are sharply drawn - yet still they allow for contradictions and complexities
For example, here is a scene from the beginning of the story, where the married couple are entering o their cars in the parking lot after attending attending an expensive and useless session with a marriage counselor.
In that session, the wife was pleading to discover just what kind of recreational activities her husband would enjoy doing with her. Yet now in the parking lot, she lights up a cigarette to relieve her tension. Meanwhile, he is having some difficulty entering his car since the door is blocked by the open door of her car. She could care less about him. (and note the visual enhancement offered by the background: the cross-like street light that anoints her head, while a green spray of foliage emerges, like a bad emotion, from his.
In contrast to the therapy session that they just left - he is now trying to accommodate her, rather than the other way around.
**************
Political correctness seems to be the main concern in Susan Kemp's review
"episode one focuses on a somewhat insufferable, elderly Parisian woman named Anushka (Marth Keller) who’s at a point in her life where she needs a caretaker to help her about --- The agency sends a young Muslim woman putting herself through nursing school. The racial tensions are immediate and brutal, but the two eventually find a fondness for each other. “So this is a serious drama,” the viewer may decide. Au contraire, dear viewer. It’s not until the episode’s final act that the rags-to-riches Cinderella story gives way to something of a farce....Weiner seems less interested in exploring issues of race or faith and more interested in using Hajar as a foil to the extravagance that is Anushka and family."
james poniewozik
As the creator of “Mad Men,” Matthew Weiner had a thing about spoilers. Each season arrived with a list of no-nos for critics, such as the number of floors in the advertising office where it was set. When he announced a series for Amazon Prime, I joked that maybe he’d make it a spoiler to say what the new show was about.
I have to hand it to him with “The Romanoffs,” which begins Friday. I’ve seen three episodes, and I couldn’t tell you what the series is if I wanted to.
O.K., in broad terms I can. The episodes are stand-alone stories, with different stars and a thin tissue of connection: contemporary characters who are associated with or believe they are descended from the Russian royal family, whose members were executed by Bolsheviks in 1918. (Sorry, spoiler.)
I can also say that “The Romanoffs” is TV only in the broadest sense. The episodes, around an hour and a half in length, are essentially movies. The first three installments are eclectic, sometimes beguiling and each, in a different way, ultimately frustrating.
The series begins elegantly, in Paris, with “The Violet Hour.” Anushka (Marthe Keller), a spiteful, elderly aristocrat, is attended by her American nephew, Greg (Aaron Eckhart), and his sullen French girlfriend, Sophie (Louise Bourgoin). She keeps them in line with the promise of inheriting a Fabergé egg and her grand apartment, once used by a Russian royal as a stash pad for his mistress.
Greg’s burden is lightened, then complicated, by Anushka’s new caretaker, Hajar (Inès Melab), a Muslim woman who patiently wears down Anushka’s sourness and racism. They develop an odd, culturally freighted relationship — the senescent past reconciling itself to Europe’s future — until the last act blows up the script’s character-building for the sake of a shock ending.
“The Royal We” shifts its setting to American suburbia, and its tone to marital farce. Shelly (Kerry Bishé) finds herself vacationing alone when her mopey, dissatisfied husband, Michael (Corey Stoll), contrives an excuse to cancel. The catch: The vacation is a themed cruise for Romanov descendants. He is one, but she’s not.
Bishé is luminous but underserved by the long-suffering-wife role, and the episode finds Michael’s tedious midlife crisis way more absorbing than it is. But the scenes on the cruise — full of elderly Americans cosplaying as early-20th-century Russian nobles — are transporting. (A talkative gentleman in the bar keeps smashing his vodka glasses with a flourish; “Sir, you have to stop doing that,” the put-upon bartender says.)
There’s a sense in both early episodes that the characters have been twisted and soured by family legends they’re doomed to fall short of. “Mad Men,” too, was fascinated with the layers of history and the stub ends of the faded gentry. There’s a little Pete Campbell in each of these modern-day nobles.
And on. The episodes feel stretched out, and while Amazon clearly invested in the series, which shot in seven countries, it’s not scaled up visually to match. The episodes are movie-length but directed, by Weiner, like television.
That said, I love the audacity of the idea, the playfulness of the dialogue, the unpredictability of the storytelling. While shooting the series-with-in-a-series of the third episode, Huppert’s character says jadedly, “This is exactly what television needs: another period piece with well-dressed mannequins.”
“The Romanoffs” is not that. It’s more like a “Black Mirror” of relationships, privilege and ruling classes in decline.
All three screened episodes involve women navigating unequal power structures or dealing with men acting badly, as they often did in “Mad Men.” It’s striking since this is also Weiner’s first series since he was accused, by the “Mad Men” writer Kater Gordon, of having told her while working that she owed it to him to let him see her naked. Weiner recently told Vanity Fair that he apologized “if I have wronged somebody.” Gordon, in a post on Twitter, wrote: “My memory is intact. Matthew’s abuse of workplace power dynamics was rampant, and the comments he made should not be viewed as an isolated occurrence.”
After “Mad Men” ended, Weiner expressed doubts about binge TV. “Mad Men” was like a ghost that appeared for three months of Sundays, leaving its witnesses to interpret its portents for a week. If he ever made a streaming series, he said, he’d want it to appear weekly, to preserve that experience.
He’s done that. The first two “Romanoffs” go live Friday, with the other six coming once a week. I might start with “The Royal We,” which is not necessarily the best of the three but has the best moments, which I am enjoined from describing by the lengthy spoiler list. (Some things never change.)
Maybe the whole will add up to more. “Mad Men” seasons would often start at a slow roll, only to layer on meaning and incident and build to a breathtaking finish. Only time (if the pattern holds, about 12 hours) will tell.
But “The Romanoffs” does not introduce itself as a Russian nesting doll, one unit fitting into another to form one ingenious artifact. It’s a series of ornate but ponderous creations, a shelf-busting set of Fabergé ostrich eggs.
rolling stone - Alan Sepinwall
As a director, Weiner has only grown in confidence and skill from the Mad Men days. Working with a big budget and an international production, he paints image after image suitable for framing. Watching “Violet Hour,” it’s not hard to fall in love with the apartment and Paris itself given the lush way he films both. Even a small moment like two characters holding hands can feel enormously moving. And he gets excellent, lived-in performances from his actors, particularly the women. Keller and Melab make their polar-opposite strangers feel equally human. Every moment Bishé has on the cruise ship will leave you wanting to either re-watch Halt and Catch Fire or seek it out for the first time and wonder why she isn’t a huge star already. For that matter, Hendricks’ turn as a successful actress feels like Weiner’s retort to an industry that hasn’t quite figured out what to do with her since she stopped playing Joan.
But short stories should be, well, short, and at roughly 90 minutes apiece (others, I’m told, vary from 60 to 90), each of these initial tales overstays its welcome. They’re movie-length without substantial enough ideas behind them to justify it. Stoll’s character does a half-assed 12 Angry Men act that feels belabored by the end of the first scene that establishes what he’s doing, only the episode keeps returning to it as if it’s still funny. “House of Special Purpose” is seven or eight different shows in one, and ultimately chooses to focus on the least compelling of those.
The self-indulgent pacing can also feel off in the opposite way. Where certain points are repeated long after they’ve sunk in, others are hastily introduced at the end because they’re necessary to the picture Weiner is drawing. In particular, Melab’s character makes a choice at the conclusion of “The Violet Hour” that comes completely out of nowhere and undercuts much of the emotion of what came before. Each episode works better — at times spectacularly so — in individual moments than as a whole.
Coming off one of the greatest TV shows ever made, and despite the allegations against him, Weiner had the clout for Amazon to let him do whatever he wanted. (This includes releasing most episodes weekly rather than as a binge, though “Violet Hour” and “The Royal We” debut together on October 12.) But creativity without limits can be dangerous, even for someone this gifted. Weiner’s fictional wanna-be-Romanovs have to make do with a less opulent world than their DNA might tell them they deserve; the series, likewise, may have been better off living within stricter means.
Matt Roush
The result, from what I’ve seen, is extremely well acted and luxuriantly produced, though something of a grand but ineffectual folly, an opulent enterprise often eliciting little more than a head-scratching “Is that all there is?” after these overlong, indulgent vignettes. (The first three clock in at around 90 swollen minutes each.)
The tone shifts gears from a trite tale of marital stagnation and temptation from the John Cheever playbook (“The Royal We,” with Corey Stoll, Kerry Bishé and Noah Wyle) to a more successful attempt to evoke The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling in the surreal and disorienting “House of Special Purpose" (streaming Oct. 19). That episode, the best of the three, features Hendricks as a glamorous replacement actress awkwardly thrust into a fictional—and by the looks of it, awful—Romanov miniseries, helmed by a perversely manipulative director (Huppert) who blurs the line between reality and fantasy.
The series comes from the producer behind 'Mad Men.'
The cosmopolitan feel of The Romanoffs, shot in seven countries with multiple languages (many subtitled), is most apparent in the opening installment, “The Violet Hour.” Set in contemporary Paris, it may induce severe apartment envy as the camera glides through the rooms occupied by an aging, imperious and bigoted dowager (Keller), whose American nephew (Aaron Eckhart) tends to her whims while awaiting his inheritance. The arrival of a Muslim caregiver (Ines Melab) upsets the uneasy balance in this fractious family dynamic, though describing what happens as dramatic may be an overstatement.
Keller's ruminations on the tragic Romanov heritage reveal a poignant longing for connection to a legendary past. I only wish Weiner’s modern-day fables had as much power
new yorker
Emily Nussbaum
“The Romanoffs,” an anthology of stories about descendants—or people who claim to be descendants—of the Russian royal family, is also a show about power. (And about fame: in a certain light, even the most decadent Russian duchess is just an influencer with a fluffier coat.) But it feels troubled by the same impostor syndrome that it seeks to explore, like a pencil sketch overwhelmed by a gold frame.
This isn’t to say that “The Romanoffs” offers no pleasures; it does. The first time I watched the three eighty-minute episodes sent to critics (along with the terrifying Weiner spoiler-warning embargo that critics grew to expect during the run of “Mad Men”), I slipped into a drugged-out trance, relaxing into the lush, stylized mise en scène that is Weiner’s trademark. In the first episode, a camera interrogating the details of a gorgeous Parisian apartment—peering at high ceilings and swanky moldings, Persian carpets and fringed curtain ties, then glancing at a lovely view of the Eiffel Tower—has the immersive feel that another director might give the Battle of the Bulge. The series was shot on location in Romania, France, and six other countries. The musical cues, too, are almost deliriously indulgent, down to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Refugee,” whose pulse drives the show’s clever credit sequence, in which blood drips through photographs of the Romanov dynasty.
Yet the stories themselves feel small. They’re fables, not operas—undeveloped vignettes with plot twists that slam the door on ambiguity. The first two installments, “The Violet Hour” and “The Royal We,” are morality tales about a battle between decency and selfishness; both rely on surprise endings that provide closure but aren’t particularly believable. There are also a few repeated motifs: each story features a lunkishly hot American man (one more of a jerk than the other, but both with a Don Draper swagger); a decent woman trying her best to communicate with someone who seems impossible to communicate with (and maybe isn’t worth it); and a cynical sexpot, who gets good lines and a camera ogling her pretty legs. It’s like a dream being replayed, with familiar figures assuming different guises. Neither of the stories was fully satisfying, but both had moments of eerie beauty—Aaron Eckhart waving his hands to music; Kerry Bishé, in a ball gown, gazing at the ocean—that, while I was watching, made them feel worthwhile. And then they dissolved.
“The Violet Hour” is the most interesting of the three episodes. In it, the Swiss actress Marthe Keller plays Anushka, a Romanov descendant who abuses and berates Hajar (Inès Melab), a Muslim caretaker who has been hired by her nephew, Greg (Aaron Eckhart), to keep an eye on her. The story, which involves the inheritance of that fabulous Paris apartment, is a world-historical sparring match seen through the lens of one family—a debate about who owns what, what kind of identity counts as “real,” and who gets to be French. It’s centrally a sharp portrait of Anushka, a racist blue blood who embraces her family’s hideous history but who is also, in her way, a fragile figure; her entitlement is its own kind of disguise. “You’ve never had servants,” she sneers, when Greg’s girlfriend objects to her behavior—for her, the world is made up of masters and subjects, and if you’re not consistently cruel you’ll lose your spot. Eckhart, as Greg, is hangdog hot; Louise Bourgoin is vivid, if one-note, as Greg’s C-word of a girlfriend.
The real problem is that the story never earns the fairy-tale leap it demands that viewers accept, a development that you might begin to suspect halfway through. As likable as Melab’s performance is, and, for all the sequences we see of her at home with her family, her character never becomes much more than a symbolic “good Muslim,” an exemplary figure who patiently fields the questions of the racists she works for, a decent woman who remains loving despite the hatred directed at her. To enjoy the episode, you have to ignore that existential hollowness—and the way it structurally mirrors the racism that it claims to critique—and so I did. Maybe, like the show’s characters, I was simply willing to make a few sacrifices to linger on that nice sofa and take in that perfect view.
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