Masterpiece Contemporary: Framed [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

"Framed" is a new television co-production of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), and the American PBS--public broadcasting stations-- the Masterpiece Theatre Contemporary program. It might best be described as a romantic comedy, and stars the intense and gripping Trevor Eve as Quentin Lester, a curator at London's world-famous National Gallery that houses some of the world's most valuable, most loved art work. (Eve stars in the mystery series Waking The Dead : Complete BBC Series 1 [2001] [DVD], and Heat Of The Sun [DVD] [1998]). His co-star is Eve Myles as Angharad Stannard, schoolteacher in Manod, a small, remote Welsh village that was largely abandoned after its local mines went dry. (Myles was once called "Wales' best-kept secret" by Russell T. Davis, screenwriter of Casanova [2005] [DVD], who created the role of Gwen for her in Torchwood - The Collection (Series 1-3) [DVD] [2007]. The actress has been seen as Maggy in Little Dorrit [DVD] [2008]. She has appeared in a number of other BBC television series including Doctor Who and Merlin). The entertainment was based on a best-selling British children's book of the same name (Framed) by Frank Cottrell Boyce, who also wrote the screen play.

Lester is portrayed as a man who prefers "his" glorious pictures to messy old humanity, and doesn't realize how lonely and estranged he is. That is, until the malfunction of the Gallery's overwhelmed, Victorian-era plumbing system floods the place and requires emergency measures. The pictures must be evacuated. So the gallery officials borrow a page from history - actual, true history, according to Boyce's production notes:

"During World War II, Winston Churchill made the safety of the paintings in the National Gallery his personal responsibility. Art is often looted in wartime (that's how a lot of the paintings in the gallery got there in the first place), and he was determined that it wouldn't happen in London. The paintings were hidden in a vast cave, in a slate mine, a mile underground in the remote town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. It was supposed to be top secret but a convoy of trucks must have been a fairly conspicuous event in the town. Especially as the railway bridge was too low to let them pass and they had to lower the road."

Thus, the gallery officials decide, once again, to truck the pictures to the same disused slate mine, in the village here called Manod. And in Manod, Lester bumps up against the adorable, feisty and eccentric schoolteacher Angharad, who is probably too young to be his daughter, and a busload of adorable, feisty school children, all of whom take too much interest in his precious Raphaels, Titians, Donatellos and Velasquez. Well, it's interesting to look at rural Wales, and the photography is fine. The acting is appropriate to the vehicle. Apart from that, the plot shows all too clearly its lineage as a children's book, and is all too predictably linear. The whimsy is sometimes thick as the local fog, and the wet sentimentality could flood that vast cave in the mines. I suppose it passes the time. But I dunno, Eve may have wanted to lighten up his intense and somber image, but I wish he'd chosen another way to do it.