Jodie Turner-Smith leads the British three-part miniseries chronicling the final days of Henry VIII's second wife, who was executed by beheading in 1536.
Unbeknownst to Anne, however, the clock is already ticking on her life. Before we get to the party, there’s a flash-forward to Anne’s guilty verdict, and title cards near the start of each episode count down the days until her death. By the start of the three-episode miniseries, she’s already down to five months. The choice to mark the passage of time relative to her death adds a bit of narrative tension to what’s already a well-known story, and addresses head-on the elephant in the room.
To Hedderwick Turner’s credit, she carves out room within that too-tidy construction for Anne to be messy and unpredictable. She creeps into Henry’s bedchamber and chokes him in his sleep; it’s foreplay with a titillating shade of treason. She plants a kiss on Jane Seymour and declares that she understands the appeal, trying to come to terms with Henry’s wandering eye even as she increasingly rages against it. She’s as sincere in her prayers as she is in her relish for power.
We are left instead to cobble together an understanding of the bigger picture from snatches of conversation and our own recollections from history classes or other Henry VIII-centric shows and movies, and simply imagine what Anne must have been like at the center of it all. It’s as if we’ve opened a delicious novel about Anne, only to discover that all but the final pages have been ripped out.
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