A Gentleman in Moscow
Can I just start this with a totally random aside? Ewan McGregor could totally be Tom Selleck's doppelganger circa peak Magnum, P.I. fame in this series. That stache, that hair... Damn. It's uncanny. Moving on from my random Thomas Magnum obsession, which is hard to move on from while watching this show... A Gentleman in Moscow... This limited series is a love letter to a bygone era of class and elegance. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest by the Bolsheviks. It just so happens that his "home" is the Hotel Metropol Moscow. There the lives of the patrons and workers of the hotel become his entire world. He is living the Eloise dream! The dream I held for many years as a kid. We'd go down to Chicago often and stay at The Drake Hotel. I loved that hotel so much. Everything about it, the lush carpeting, the flower arrangements taller than I was. I wanted to live there and when I found out that people actually did live there, it became a secret dream of mine. A dream that Count Rostov lives. If in an involuntary manner. Though this is set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and the elegance and wealth of the upper class was being continually chipped away. So we see him thrown from his palatial rooms with the precious relics of his old life taken from him and banished to the attics. He moves from patron to prisoner to proletarian. All the while trying to find the silver lining in a very bleak world. And sometimes it's up to outside forces to give him the will to go on. Sometimes it's the bees. If there's one country in the world that faced the greatest upheaval in the 20th century it was Russia. This is a paean to that upheaval, that drastic change, through the eyes of someone who had the most to lose and in the end gained the most. Count Rostov, if the revolution hadn't come about, would have lived a life of idolatry and dissipation. Travelling throughout Europe from one luxury hotel to another like Maxim de Winter. And like Maxim he had a tragic death of a woman he loved in his past. Count Rostov would have been more concerned with manners and keeping up appearances than noticing the plight of those around. He knew the waiters and the workers on a superficial level, but his new circumstances give him a depth. He becomes someone to count on, someone who is entrusted with the life of a young girl who becomes his daughter, whom he would willingly give up his life for. He finds a family. But all the while the horrors of the present are banging on the doors of the hotel. Friends disappear. Friends die. The cultural shift becomes more and more dangerous. While this change takes place over decades we can't help but feel a connection to the times becoming more and more dangerous and strong men in power posing a threat. Now is the time for this show because it resonates. We must stand up to the evil, we must make our plans, and we must risk everything for freedom for those we love, even if we will not live to see that day. And while this show has big themes, it's just like a Fabergé egg, small bejeweled perfection that can be held carefully in the hand. As carefully as every human life.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo
