Advertisement

True Romance

I wasn’t crazy about The Tudors when I first gave it a shot, but I decided to try it again over the weekend. Fortunately, I got to the episodes involving the romance between Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor.It helps that the actors involved are terrific. Gabrielle Anwar took a while to grow on me on Burn Notice — I find her somewhat alarmingly thin — but I think she’s wonderful, tough and funny and very sweet when the part calls for it. I’m not as familiar with Henry Cavill’s work, I honestly don’t remember him in the oddly inert 2002 adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. But he reminds me of a slightly rougher Matthew Bomer on White Collar, and that’s a good thing.I think they work together so well, though, in part because their developing romance stands in contrast to Henry’s profligacies. I said the first time I watched the show that I was surprised watching Jonathan Rhys Meyers getting it on could be so incredibly boring. By contrast, there’s a slow burn between Cavill and Anwar. Because we know history, we know essentially from the minute they meet that there’s going to be a conflagration. But the show takes its time with them. When they finally do have sex, it’s sort of supremely silly that they do so on a ship, in the middle of a storm. But at least juxtaposing their coupling with the force of the sea seems reasonably earned: they’re equals, and equal in the seduction. And when Anwar murders her aged husband, the show justifies that too, showing us how hideous it must have been to go through the ritual of a formal bedding with a crowd of spectators, even if you weren’t in love with someone else.This isn’t to advance some sort of prudish notion that love is always more narratively interesting than sex. Of course that isn’t the case. But putting a bit of effort into staging sex and drawing out the emotions involved, no matter how fleeting the liaison, is always worth it.

Advertisement