View
comments
Baptiste
Take Off With Bradley And Holly
Fiona Shaw is extraordinary. Baptiste (BBC1) is a drama about a woman at a constant pitch of hysterical terror — and yet who, even when she is screaming, can barely express her feelings.
I can't think of any other actress capable of exposing so much raw pain, and simultaneously showing us that her character is numb to it.
Ambassador Emma Chambers, whose husband and daughter are both dead and whose sons are hostages, is so tightly wound that her emotions are cut off. Her repression acts like a tourniquet.
For much of the story she is in a wheelchair. At one point, about to recruit former police inspector Zsofia Arslan (Dorka Gryllus) for a surveillance mission, she pummels her paralysed legs.
Tcheky Karyo as Julien Baptiste and Fiona Shaw as Emma Chambers in Baptiste
'I can't move them but I can feel every excruciating thing,' she says. Her emotions mimic her legs — they're agony but unresponsive.
The drama follows two parallel timelines, the beginning of her family's terrorism ordeal and its aftermath. Earlier, in an effort to drown out her feelings, she walked around her apartment, switching on TVs and radios — piano concertos, rock, news bulletins all blaring.
Writers Jack and Harry Williams use a similar technique to overwhelm us with action. Scenes do not follow in chronological order: they multiply, one on top of the other.
It's not difficult to tell the present-day events from those 14 months earlier. Grieving detective Julien Baptiste was