The HANDMAID'S TALE

   Film (1990). Cinecom/Bioskop. Dir Volker Schlondorff, starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth McGovern, Victoria Tennant, Robert Duvall. Screenplay Harold Pinter (1930-), based on THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1985) by Margaret ATWOOD. 108 mins. Colour.

   A near-future USA, some time after a right-wing coup, is now a patriarchal, fundamentalist, totalitarian state, suppressive of all liberal thought and especially of women, who have no rights at all. The heroine is a "handmaid", one of the few women whose reproductive systems have survivedthe (very vaguely specified) ravages of chemical pollution and radiation from power-plants. A handmaid's duty is to bear children to important men, conception taking place at ceremonies where she is sandwiched between piously thrusting husband and demure wife; the baby is taken by the wife. This US/German adaptation was perhaps doomed to failure. The believabilityof Atwood's original novel depends largely on texture, on irony, on the watchful but partially submissive consciousness through which its events are filtered: novels of this kind are notoriously difficult to film. Stripped of this fineness of observation, THT's lurid future is sodiagrammatic - despite excellent performances - that suspension of disbelief becomes impossible. The most terrifying aspect of the novel, the wounded complicity with which many of its women consent to their own dehumanization, is weakened by making the film's heroine (Richardson) an active revolutionary who finally cuts the throat of her owner, played by Duvall, whose portrayal of nearly unconscious hypocrisy - he sees himselfas a kind man - is the best thing in the film.

   PN