Lydia Weston, Hannah Randall and Matty Wickham arrive in Berkeley Square as nannies for their new employers. Berkeley Square begins in a Scorsesean manner. Its first episode, not at all like many other English expositions, is kept at a crisp pace with ambiance changing distinctly from one shot to another. It would rather slow down in the middle, but that slow period is not so slow as it is leisurely, aligning itself with the scope it is allowed to magnify the lives and character developments by at least three times the amount it could have were it not an original mini-series and rather a feature film. It is a great story to be told in a visual medium, on account of its locale, its ensemble potential and the effects of its episodic nature, yet a two- or three-hour movie would hardly fulfill the scope and measure of it.
One can only love dearly these women. They each are distinctively different from each other, poles apart even, and there is an air of pressure released from the screen when we grow to care desperately about one, who arrives in London with her illegitimate baby after she is forced to flee Yorkshire by her angry neighbors, and are delivered into the next scene and it involves an assertive young selfhood-concerned recently hired nanny, whose life is only beginning to ground the roots of such a degree of dilemma. But that grows to be the director's leg up in augmenting our emotional involvement to a sizable enhancement.
Being a miniseries, we can almost be promised top-notch acting, the actors having a considerably larger amount of time to immerse themselves in their roles, and in Berkeley Square, whether or not that is the case, that is fortunately almost irrelevant due to this being the most English production I have seen in a very long time. And so, the technical film-making is always temperate in the degree to which it draws attention to any existence behind the camera, if perceptible at all, the production design is not only realistic but entirely authentic, and the acting is first-class. All of it. Playing the Polish landlady of the former of the recent nanny I mentioned is an actress named Etela Pardo, who unjustly became nothing more than a completely unknown character actress for television. In consideration of the entire first- rate cast, Etela Pardo deserves special recognition for her heartbreaking powerhouse performance.
Lydia Weston is the young Devon farm girl, who has surprisingly been hired to replace the aging Nanny, in the London house of an Earl and Countess, whose social circle includes an upper-crust couple of utterly selfish social climbers whose problems are all self-inflicted and shallow. We care a great deal about peripheral characters, and love, hate and understand all of them. Berkeley Square has enough time for colossal mood swings. There is almost unbearable tragedy, and there is farce. Berkeley Square must not merely be judged by its seemingly scarce target audience who admires BBC miniseries about the snootiest high society of historical England. It must be seen for its story, a beautiful, cataclysmal, epic, sweeping capsule of a microcosm of everything in life we know and understand.
One can only love dearly these women. They each are distinctively different from each other, poles apart even, and there is an air of pressure released from the screen when we grow to care desperately about one, who arrives in London with her illegitimate baby after she is forced to flee Yorkshire by her angry neighbors, and are delivered into the next scene and it involves an assertive young selfhood-concerned recently hired nanny, whose life is only beginning to ground the roots of such a degree of dilemma. But that grows to be the director's leg up in augmenting our emotional involvement to a sizable enhancement.
Being a miniseries, we can almost be promised top-notch acting, the actors having a considerably larger amount of time to immerse themselves in their roles, and in Berkeley Square, whether or not that is the case, that is fortunately almost irrelevant due to this being the most English production I have seen in a very long time. And so, the technical film-making is always temperate in the degree to which it draws attention to any existence behind the camera, if perceptible at all, the production design is not only realistic but entirely authentic, and the acting is first-class. All of it. Playing the Polish landlady of the former of the recent nanny I mentioned is an actress named Etela Pardo, who unjustly became nothing more than a completely unknown character actress for television. In consideration of the entire first- rate cast, Etela Pardo deserves special recognition for her heartbreaking powerhouse performance.
Lydia Weston is the young Devon farm girl, who has surprisingly been hired to replace the aging Nanny, in the London house of an Earl and Countess, whose social circle includes an upper-crust couple of utterly selfish social climbers whose problems are all self-inflicted and shallow. We care a great deal about peripheral characters, and love, hate and understand all of them. Berkeley Square has enough time for colossal mood swings. There is almost unbearable tragedy, and there is farce. Berkeley Square must not merely be judged by its seemingly scarce target audience who admires BBC miniseries about the snootiest high society of historical England. It must be seen for its story, a beautiful, cataclysmal, epic, sweeping capsule of a microcosm of everything in life we know and understand.