Word: merricks
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...THIS END, John Hurt, as Winston, is also marvelous. Previously John Merrick in The Elephant Man and the fool in Olivier's King Lear, Hurt is the archetypal common man, his face a veritable roadmap of toil and suffering. His love scenes with the fresh-faced Suzanna Hamilton (Julia) are as tenderly pathetic as the tiny, dilapitated room in which they take place. He is dwarfed by a huge video screen as he sits hunched and writes in his diary, an action that seems both puny and heroic. Throughout the film, Hurt never loses that peculiar combination of hope...
...Kumar has just emerged from a previous incarnation at an exclusive English boarding school, and finds himself an alien in the land of his fathers. While the lovers are drawing close enough to realize the distance between them, they are constantly shadowed by a working-class British officer, Ronald Merrick (Tim Pigott-Smith). Perversely relishing his lack of old school ties, Merrick remains a perennial odd man out in British India, resented by well-bred Britons, resentful of well-heeled Indians...
When Daphne is raped in mysterious circumstances, the brutal Merrick seizes on the opportunity to arrest and torture Kumar. While Kumar languishes in jail, the story follows Merrick to another posting, and to a potential odd coupling between another Englishwoman, Sarah Layton (Geraldrne James), and an Indian, Ahmed Kasim (Derrick Branche). Around them all and around every corner hovers Count Bro-nowsky (Eric Porter). In a world where British cliques and clans are mixed with Hindu castes and classes, Bronowsky-a Russian emigre, an aristocrat and a confirmed bachelor-does not fit on any score. But neither does Merrick...
...found at the bedsides of the series' variously suffering characters, Geraldine James is unremittingly sensible. So too is Charles Dance as Guy Perron, the thoughtful, soft-spoken officer with whom she feels rapport. But the most dominant of all the performances is that of Pigott-Smith as Merrick. Holding together the entire series with the black magic of a self-made lago, he is a picture of twisted pride and prejudice, his face permanently pinched, his upper lip invariably quivering toward a sneer...
...action closes in on Layton and four other mem-sahibs, the show could be mistaken for a provincial soap opera, and a brackish one at that. Sometimes too it parades a kind of sincerity that teeters on melodrama. Symbols are spelled out, symmetries underlined, characters displayed with embarrassing nakedness. Merrick never tires of proclaiming his lower-class origins, and Kumar commits such lines as "I hate ... most of all myself, for being black and being English." Nevertheless, the rippling succession of slow, soft moments gathers such cumulative resonance that the series' conclusion is both shattering and ineffably moving...