Home truths revealed in Bevan Lee's new family drama

A NEW drama set in the 1950s explores the destructive power of family secrets.

A Place to Call Home

'GOING to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven," Shirley Hazzard's narrator muses in her novel The Transit of Venus, about life in pre-World War II Sydney, where only death or departure overseas had the potential to cause change. It was, she says, "a mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same".

Bevan Lee's impressive A Place to Call Home, elegantly produced in-house for Seven by John Holmes and Julie McGauran and directed by Roger Hodgman, begins a little later, in 1953, in an Australia still raw from the horrors of that terrible conflict. And Lee and his collaborators deliver a stylishly visual realisation of cultural history, dramatic action and writerly detail converging in a form we've not seen in our TV drama before.

"I set out to create a narrative-dense romantic melodrama, in the mould of Douglas Sirk's movies of the 50s such as Written on the Wind and All That Heaven Allows," Lee says.

"I want to fight the rise of melodrama being viewed as a somehow lesser form. To me a good melodrama is a big plum pudding of a show, full of fruit, flavour and the odd surprise threepence."

And he has succeeded admirably, his new series a banquet for the eye and nourishment for the heart and mind.

A mysterious woman (Marta Dusseldorp) carrying two suitcases returns to what was formerly her home in the Rocks in central Sydney after 20 years overseas, only to find the familiar welcome mat - at which she stares for a long moment. Once promised to God as a nun by her mother, Grace (Kris McQuade), the 41-year-old's father died at the battle of Fromelles in World War I and her brothers in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Death, therefore, is no stranger to this woman, who continues to carry her own scars from the war and who harbours many secrets she is loath to share.

Until recently a nurse in a London hospital, she had escaped the hold of Grace and the Church with the help of her Aunt Peg (Judy Farr), leaving Sydney to visit the Continent for a few months to see her father's grave. Life, and the war, had intervened. Now, tragic news from her beloved aunt has brought her back to the mother who still rejects her for the choices she made and an Australia poised on the cusp of social change.

At this point Lee, who possesses an almost Dickensian brain when it comes to plot twists and unexpected story moves that make perfect logical sense, introduces the second big narrative arc, taking us back in time slightly.

Working her way home on an ocean liner, the woman we quickly come to know as Sister Sarah Adams becomes intimately involved in the lives of the Blighs, a wealthy pastoralist family. Nursing the uncompromising matriarch, Elizabeth (Noni Hazlehurst), she is romantically drawn to her gentle widower son George (Brett Climo), but also inadvertently becomes involved in a family secret that links her future inextricably with the family.

After a failed attempted reconciliation with her fierce Catholic mother, Sarah accepts an offer from George Bligh to work in rural Inverness at the hospital near his family estate, Ash Park. But she has the doughty Elizabeth to contend with, as well as unwanted echoes from her past.

There is a lot of plot to contend with, two major threads of an expansive story about a woman snatched from the ordinary and forced to define herself in ways she could never have imagined. Lee unravels it all calmly and effortlessly, all grace and subtext.

"I think we wanted a style that reflected the women's pictures of the 50s era, always gripping and intriguing, but more measured, and less assuming the audience are all in the grip of attention deficit disorder than are a lot of today's entertainments," he says.

There is a long way to go in this saga but I sense it's about the destructiveness of family secrets and the awesome if paradoxical power they have to unite and divide people. Lee's shows, which include All Saints, Packed to the Rafters and Winners & Losers, often involve secrets, the way we encounter them in every area of life, and how they are perhaps most destructive when kept in the home.

If loved ones keep secrets from each other - or from the outside world - the emotional consequences can last lifetimes. These days, the presumption is that revealing secrets - no matter how, when or to whom - is morally superior to keeping them. And that it is automatically healing.

My own experience, however, has shown me that it's often better to shut your gob, as my mother used to say (she would have loved this show); that telling secrets in the wrong way or at the wrong time can be remarkably painful and destructive.

And that's the problem facing the Blighs, and especially Elizabeth, a stickler for manners in a period when cultural convention made shameful secrets out of too many events in the course of life. It becomes apparent that her family is about to face dilemmas revolving around secrecy, privacy, silence and openness. And so is the country itself: Australia has been changed forever by the events of World War II, and by the increasing independence of women such as Sarah Adams.

I enjoyed the program immensely and would follow Dusseldorp deep into the dark night of any intelligent TV series. There's no doubt Lee has an instinctive understanding of what Australians want to watch and he has demonstrated, time and again, that dramas with accessible, familiar characters burdened by ordinary problems are what appeal to the audience.

"That's not to say he's locked into a view of our culture that is bound by the familiar and the ordinary; far from it," says his former colleague, TV writer Tony Cavanaugh, who worked with Lee on a number of shows including The Flying Doctors, and is now also a successful crime novelist. "He understands menace and the bizarre. Stories pour out of him and, in a story conference, he is always on fire. Always. If a story is not working, he'll summon up another brilliant narrative with extraordinary twists, in an instant."

Hodgman, the show's establishing or "set-up" director, directs calmly but also expansively, using a lot of wide-angle establishing shots that provide looming close-ups (what directors call editing in the camera), eschewing the fashion in TV production for building dialogue scenes out of quickly intercut brief grabs.

"I was intent on writing a show with content and substance and determined not to follow the current trend of shaking the camera, cutting every second or so and assaulting the ear with sound and fury signifying nothing other than an attempt to hide the paucity of narrative," Lee says.

Hodgman's direction serves Lee well. Sometimes he carves up the frame, like Sirk did so often in those luxuriant melodramas, in order to isolate people from one another and resolutely refuses us a sense of a steady progression towards a revelation, even when we are about to think, "For god's sake get on with it, Roger."

Eventually he wins you over and you start to delight in the beautiful landscapes and the sheer beauty of Dusseldorp's face with its lovely planes and angles.

Last year Dusseldorp was the best thing in the ABC's legal drama Crownies as Janet King, the tenacious, scary litigator with chiselled good looks and sly wit. She's become one of the most accomplished and charismatic actors around; few have her ability to use their mouths, brows and eyes as the prime source of information and emotion. She simply devours the close-up, almost willing the camera to become more intimate with her, knowing exactly how to scale her performance across varying degrees of tight framings.

She carries this new series, appearing in practically every scene, graceful and elegant but with a just subdued feistiness hovering beneath her tight smile.

Climo also stands out in this first episode, a sense of courtesy and civility about him.

And Hazlehurst dominates every scene she is in, jowly and dogmatic, the family's keeper of secrets, just a touch of Gina Rinehart drolly lurking.

This really is an accomplished piece of long-form storytelling. As Cavanaugh suggests, if he - and we - were in the US, Bevan Lee would be a household name and he'd have achieved a very different level of respect. "I guess it's because he creates and writes shows that have a mass appeal," Cavanaugh says. "Like an Aaron Spelling, maybe."

ANOTHER show starts this week starring a beautiful 40-year-old actress, like Dusseldorp as intelligent and charismatic as she is skilful. Borgen - apparently pronounced like the English word "bone" and which translates as "the Castle", the nickname for the seat of Danish government, also known as the Christiansborg Palace - revolves around Sidse Babett Knudsen's portrayal of Birgitte Nyborg, the fictional first female prime minister of Denmark. She assumes power almost accidentally, and a little ingenuously, after a political scandal involving a credit card statement and an unstable wife on a buying spree in London ensnares her predecessor, Lars Hesselboe (Soren Spanning).

The series is prefaced by a quote from Machiavelli: "A prince should have no higher aim or target but war and its organisation and discipline."

But Nyborg, the 40-year-old leader of the Moderate Party, is no disciplined political warrior, at least not at the beginning of this acclaimed series. Instead she's reasonable and charming and leads a happy family life with her husband and two children. (The first episode is titled "Decency in the Middle".)

While she has a commitment to social issues, a big heart and too little time, she has no idea of the damage her new professional life will wreak on her family life as she begins the complex task of building a coalition government. And the decent Nyborg must accomplish it all in the glare of a relentless Danish press corps that covers her administration in the incessant 24-hour news cycle. Sound familiar?

She is thrust into the spotlight after her "spin doctor" Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek) releases sensitive documents about prime minister Hesselboe to one of her opponents, the Labor Party's unctuous Michael Laugesen (Peter Mygind).

Laugesen deploys the documents in a live televised debate between candidates - a superb sequence - and is quickly disowned by his own party.

There is political chaos and the final countdown to polling day is full of unexpected twists on every front as Denmark readies itself for parliamentary elections.

Nyborg disregards her political advisers and unilaterally heads off in her own direction, confident in her instincts but with little idea whether the voters will reward or punish her. But it seems to be working when another adviser says on election night, "You hit the zeitgeist; this is the start of something new."

The series chronicles the formation of the loose centre-left coalition government that Nyborg ends up leading and follows her progression from smiling ingenue to steely ruler; and the way Nyborg's personal life starts to disintegrate at the same time as her political success is applauded.

It's a drama that deals with the concerns of both the political and domestic as Nyborg inevitably becomes a bad wife and a distracted mother, given the demands of ruling the state.

"You could argue that men have had 10,000 years of letting down their wives and their family, because they needed to lead armies into war and so on," says the show's creator Adam Price.

"Women have only had about 100 years of professional life, and perhaps only 40, 50 years of playing a serious part in political life. Therefore, I thought it would be more interesting to watch a woman let down the feelings that are dear to her, than watch a man doing the same thing we've always known them to do."

He describes the first season of the show as a tragedy: Nyborg the sweet, smiling woman we first encounter gradually losing everything as her political collateral rises.

It really is the most compelling TV, the Danish politics for obvious reasons having great resonance to our own situation with a federal election imminent and allegations of misogyny still reverberating in the cool Canberra air. And the show's pitch - are you able to obtain power and still maintain your self? - has as much purchase here as in Denmark.

Borgen is produced by DR, the Danish public broadcaster that produced those other international Danish hit series The Killing and The Bridge, also led by strong, uncompromising mature female characters rarely seen in television drama. The Killing's Sofie GraboI, who plays Copenhagen detective Sarah Lund, had me captivated for many hours - the sultry frostiness and those wonderful chunky knit jumpers - but I'm settling in with Sidse Babett Knudsen, the world's sexiest prime minister, for the duration. Surely it's no coincidence that Denmark elected its first female Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, six months after Borgen first aired.

Borgen, Wednesday, 9.40pm, SBS One.

A Place to Call Home, Sunday, April 28, 8.30pm, Seven.