very quickly (since i am DEFINITELY meant to be doing something else: writing a project proposal on quite a fierce deadline), i just wanted to scribble this about HINTERLAND/Y GWYLL. Much anticipated since it first ran last year on SC4 — round the time I was re-visiting that very part of wales with friends — I have been combination drawn to and disappointed by it so far (3 of 4 eps).
(image = beermat snapped in aber pub frequented by student piratemoggy)
1: i love the sheer slowness and sense of the mundane crappiness of much of actual rural life in a superpassingly beautiful landscape
2: i love love love hearing welsh spoken on TV (i grew up close to the welsh border and we visited often: i don’t speak it sadly except for a few words — araf! — but the sound of it, esp.mid-wales welsh, is very familiar and comforting to me)
3: the “cabinet of curiosities”/svankmajer/owl service-style weirdness — of abandoned houses, decaying tools, toys etc — is a bit over-amped and mannerist
[3a: total side-issue, the “cabinet of curiosities” has become such a cliche in present-day exhibition-curating circles that at work — where we have to field info about and review many such exhibitions — we have taken to calling it the “cupboard of rubbish”]
4: the lead is over-angsting by factors of ten, but i am enjoying his utterly matter-of-fact crew and their muted exasperation at his unprofessional emo-gothy shenanigans
5: his boss — who does nothing but gaze on everything via TV screens, looking as if he’s about to explode over who-knows-what but never doing so — is great
6: the stories have all been a bit “magical land of childhood terrors” so far, though i think many of the minor characters peopling them have been pretty good
7: so it’s getting some things right and some things wrong