DIRECTIONS - TV DRAMA 1 - THE CRY.

BBC1 needed to fill a void after the bodyguard finished, which was such a successful drama and to fill that void it had to be something spectacular.

Before I started this course I was not a huge fan of TV drama's because when I did get to watch TV I watched mainly sitcoms to help me wind down and that was less strenuous on the brain, shows like 'Only fools and horses' and 'Friends'

The cry appealed to me at first because it was relatable to me in regards to the issues that surrounded  post natal depression.

I also wanted to no what all the hype was about after the bodyguard finished.

Jenna Coleman plays a mother who is suffering from post natal depression, her husband, Alister takes Joanna (Coleman) and their baby to Australia so he can fight for custody for his 14 year old daughter.

When arriving in Australia they stop at a house where Joanna discovers that their baby is dead in the baby chair in the back of their car, sounds like a simple plot don't it?

What Australian Director Glendy Ivin was very good at, was teasing and playing with the audiences minds. In the opening sequence of episode 1, Joanna is standing up in a court room, wearing her grey suit an oath, she has two police officers sitting next to her.

                                    

Suggesting that she has done something criminal and is being charged for a serious crime or that she maybe already being held in remand.

Then Ivin takes us on a journey full of twists and turns, in the next scene we see Joanna struggling with her new born baby, which could suggest that the crime she could of committed was to do with the baby and maybe that she couldn't cope and hurt that baby.

The scene that follows, her, her husband Alister and the baby are on a plane, then in Australia, Ivin flicks between scenes and time zones, making it a challenge as an audience to keep up.

However, Ivin is very good at the appealing to the emotions of the audience, Jenna plays her character with venerability and she grows and changes throughout each episode, although she is dying inside she becomes stronger than ever in the end.

Alister puts the blame onto Joanna for killing the baby as she must have mixed up her medication with the baby's at the airport and that she must have forgot about it as she is not in the right frame of mind, he actually convinces her so much that she will do anything that he says because of the guilt that he has put upon her, he manipulates her and sets up a plan to 'keep her out of trouble', they plan to set up a fake abduction, after he buries the baby, because if they reported the baby dead and the autopsy came back they could go down for murder, Ivin does not show the baby dead in the beginning he only shows us the abduction but still making us believe that it could still be a set up, at this point he could go anyway with the story.

Alister uses the media as a spotlight and a platform for fame and takes Joanna along for the ride, but not without reminding her everyday that is is all her fault that the baby is dead.

My thought were (after the second episode) that Joanna was in court for killing her husband (which i stand correct) but I did second guess my intuition because the director cleverly showed a little bit more of what happened at the airport, so then I thought that the baby must have been found dead and Joanna killed it because she was suffering from post-natal depression, I was still right that the baby had died but not in the way that I originally thought.

The end episodes we can see Joanna that Joanna wants to break her silence and come clean but then she remember what really happened at the airport and it wasn't in-fact her that gave the baby the wrong bottle, it was Alister, and he knew it all along, Joanna finds the perfect opportunity to confront him, on a spiral road on a cliffs edge, when he admits that it was in fact him, the tension rises as the car speeds up and we see Joanna dropping gear and the exhaust spitting as they both get more and more upset, then it falls silent and everything goes in slow motion after she unbuckles his seat build and the car is driven off the side of the cliff, we see every detail of objects in the car flying about and the glass of the window screen scattering as Alister is thrown out his sit and forward out the windscreen.

Below I have added a video that sums up my review, I looked for this after I blogged.

The Cry director contextualisation.

What I like most about the direction of Glendy Ivin is the space he created emotionally and physically between Joanna and Alister.

When the characters return back to the UK they became distant with each other in both senses of the phrase. 

Ivin creates the sense of distance even if they are in the same room together talking, he uses big space and making them look small and far apart from each other, I think that it is a shallow depth of fill, but this is something that really appeals to me for my shot.

I have a married couple in one of my scenes who are experiencing the same emotions and are also in that frame of mind and I noticed that another way to create that sense is having the characters not look directly at each other, or one never looking at the other, like Joanna never looked directly into Alister's eyes, this is a good indication to the audience that they are not in a happy place.

Ivin also made the house feel cold, still and quiet, he used blue, grey and white tones in large spaces, I have a similar colour palette to create that cold feeling, but I think that lighting can be used also to create that feeling also, as I am filming in my house I cannot decorate but I can use what I have and adjust the lighting elements. He also filled the frame with the whole room and positioned his actors central to the frame, my rooms are not as big as the ones on the cry set but I can manipulate them by re-sizing the frame.

Ivin was also good at reminding us that a baby lived there, with photos, toy's and furniture, I am going to make us of this in my scenes as my characters also have a baby and as we only see him once in the film I can make use of props on set.