Sensitive Skin – The Complete Seasons One & Two (BBC DVD Set)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: D Episodes: B-
Joanna
Lumley is one of the most successful actresses commercially and critically of
her generation in Britain, best known for her comic work (Absolutely Fabulous) and genre work (going back to her
international splash as Purdey in The
New Avengers and work in the underrated Sapphire & Steel, both reviewed elsewhere on this site) but
that still underrates her talents. She
has proved that she can do dramatic work (Nancherrow)
and do it with irony (Peter Bogdanovich’s The
Cat’s Meow) but is still not always considered formidable in a purely
dramatic context. Sensitive Skin (2005 – 7) proves otherwise, for those with any
doubts.
Lumley
plays Davina Jackson, now 60 and happily married, she was always pretty and
though she would have likely aged well, has been using extensive hormone
replacement therapy to keep her looks and hold onto any happiness she can. With their son moved out, she and her husband
(Denis Lawson) can enjoy their classic Rolls Royce and each other for the
twilight, but she still has some problems.
She keeps
thinking deeply on her life, starts imagining old friends, even imaginary ones
and starts to question certain fundamental concepts of her life. At first, it comes on slowly, but then the
factors of whatever is unresolved slowly becomes the return of the repressed
and real life people and situations only make it slowly worse.
Writer/Producer/Director
Hugo Blick makes this a great, elongated character study of the first order,
like nothing we have seen on TV in a long time.
It may have some rough spots and points that are false notes here ands
there, but the material and approach are top rate, the sense of London now in
the early 21st Century one of the best we’ve seen and Lumley is
really amazing in yet another role and performance that shows her legacy is as
highly formidable as her talent. Why
this has not been a bigger import hit is a big mystery, but now that it has
arrived on DVD, it deserves to be one of the big surprise discoveries of the
year.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is good and clean originating on High
Definition video and one of the best such shoots we have seen to date from
British TV, with depth of field and composition that suggests that this will
make for a good Blu-ray. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Stereo is without surrounds, but is a more recent recording and
fine for a dialogue-driven show. There
are no extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
