a wimple plan

HOW THE BBC ADAP OF BLACK NARCISSUS IS GETTING THINGS IN ORDER.

- Gabriel Tate

Based on Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 psychological melodrama Black Narcissus has long been part of the film-classic canon. Starring an unforgettable Deborah Kerr, it’s a uniquely heady brew of repressed love, simmering Gothic eroticism and the crumbling of the Christian colonial project, all brought to vivid life by Jack Cardiff’s Oscar-winning Technicolor photography.

You can understand, then, why writer Amanda Coe (The Trial Of Christine Keeler) was somewhat reticent about the prospect of a new adaptation. “My initial response was: the film’s a masterpiece, so why would you create that problem for yourself?” she recalls. “But once I’d read the book, I could see the case for it. The film was made at a different time – ethnicity wasn’t treated very respectfully – and it’s a fantastic world, so I was excited about tackling it. This version is interested in how place defines and forms you. It’s also a parable about the dangers of ‘othering’, of making oneself exalted at the expense of cultures outside. Those concerns are omnipresent.”