Birdsong: Masterpiece Classic

Amazon.com Busy screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Hour, The Iron Lady) adapts Sebastian Faulks’s 1993 bestseller for this introspective Masterpiece Classic two-parter, which reflects on love and war in equal measure. Costume-drama veteran Eddie Redmayne (The Pillars of the Earth) plays Stephen Wraysford, a British textile man based in Amiens in 1910 (before his career skyrocketed, Michael Fassbender was attached to the role). While staying with Isabelle (Clemence Poesy, In Bruges) and her controlling husband, Stephen falls in love with his hostess, but her marriage and stepchildren stand in the way. The story continues to proceed along two tracks: Stephen’s time with Isabelle and her sympathetic sister, Jeanne (Marie-Josee Croze), and his time as an imperiled lieutenant in the trenches of World War I, where he finds a friend in the selfless Jack (Joseph Mawle) and a foe in the callous Captain Gray (Matthew Goode) as memories of Amiens spur him on. If the peacetime scenes are light and leisurely–sometimes too leisurely–the wartime scenes are dark and tense as Stephen and his men crawl through tunnels, setting off explosions. Flashbacks reveal that Isabelle eventually returned his affection, except the course of their relationship did not run smoothly. By the end, he’s lost most of the things he once desired, but an alternative path lies ahead. In this sense, Birdsong bears some comparison with Atonement and Downton Abbey, though the downbeat nature of the material won’t be to all tastes. –Kathleen C. Fennessy Product Description Sebastian Faulks’ epic love story, set against a backdrop of the First World War, became a modern classic when it was published in 1993. Now adapted for the screen for the first time, Abi Morgan has created a riveting, sumptuous masterpiece. Shifting in time between 1910 and 1916, Birdsong is the story of Stephen Wraysford (Eddie Redmayne, My Week with Marilyn), a young Englishman who arrives in Amiens in Northern France to stay with the Azaire family and falls desperately in love with Isabelle Azaire (Clemence Poesy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). They begin an illicit and all-consuming affair, but the relationship falters. Years later, Stephen finds himself serving on the Western Front in the very area where he experienced his great love. As he battles amidst the blood and gore of the trenches he meets Jack Firebrace (Joseph Mawle, Game of Thrones), a tunneller who unexpectedly helps him endure the ravages of war and enables him to make peace with his feelings for Isabelle. Review The memory of love pierces the thunderous fog of war in Birdsong (Sunday, PBS, check local listings), a wrenching new Masterpiece Classic that covers some of the same historical territory as this year’s Downton Abbey the terrible toll of World War I but with a grittier, less schmaltzy, more artful and erotic approach. Based on the haunting 1993 novel by Sebastian Faulks, and adapted by Abi Morgan (The Hour), this is the story of young Stephen Wraysford (Eddie Redmayne, projecting the same sort of emotional transparency he displayed in My Week With Marilyn), a British officer on the front lines in Northern France who seems perpetually lost in thought. “Funny how your head’s here, but your heart’s always somewhere else,” says a plainspoken “sewer rat” (Joseph Mawle) whose job it is to burrow beneath No Man’s Land on the Western Front in treacherous tunnels, laying charges under the German enemy. As Stephen’s new assignment takes him reluctantly underground, we retreat with him to a blessedly peaceful summer six years earlier, in the French countryside not far from the current shelling, replaying his encounter with the woman who would change his life. On first encounter with the unhappily married Isabelle (the limpid, lovely Clemence Poesy), Stephen is shell-shocked with longing and desire. The blossoming of their passionate, turbulent romance provides poignant counterpoint to the numbing carnage of war, with its horrific imagery of mud and blood hardening this boy into an aloof leader described by others as a “cold one.” If they only knew. As the stories converge at the devastating battle of the Somme, the same river where Stephen and Isabelle made their first real connection during a pastoral boating excursion, we wonder if anything can survive this tragedy. Birdsong is a tearjerker with guts and soul. –Matt Roush, TV Guide On Sunday, April 22, Masterpiece Theater debuts Birdsong, a two-parter starring Eddie Redmayne ( My Week with Marilyn ) and Clemence Poesy ( Harry Potter ). Adapted from Sebastian Faulks popular 1993 novel by acclaimed screenwriter Abi Morgan ( The Hour, The Iron Lady ), it follows Stephen Wraysford, a young English lieutenant whose war experience is framed by memories of his affair with Isabelle, an unhappily married French woman, years before. (It drops the novel s third plotline, set in the 1970s.) Birdsong is the second and best novel in a loose trilogy set in France

Features

• Factory sealed DVD