The first season of The Great, the new Hulu comedy miniseries produced and written by Tony McNamara, co-screenwriter of The Favourite (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), is led by Elle Fanning as Catherine II, the longest-serving Russian female monarch in history. The fascination with Catherine the Great isn’t something new, starting with Marlene Dietrich’s iconic performance in The Scarlet Empress (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1934) and ending with HBO’s most recent production, Catherine the Great (2019), starring Helen Mirren as the experienced sovereign. In contrast to the latter representation, McNamara concentrates on the transformation of Catherine from a naïve princess of German origin, an intruder in the Romanov dynasty, into the woman who would end up orchestrating a coup d’état in order to eliminate her husband from power, leading the Russian Empire on its path towards modernization.

The series starts with Catherine’s arrival at the court – a cultured young woman who has an unrealistic vision in regards to what matrimonial harmony entails. A highlighted scene, which brings romantic comedies to mind, shows a lively Catherine as she goes on a sincere tirade on the concept of the wedding night. The camera is fixed upon the young woman, who is seated at the top of her bed, and slowly approaches her in a close-up shot of her rosy, longing visage, suggesting post-coital euphoria. But the discrepancy between reality and expectations will force her to rapidly mature, since the young emperor, Peter, seems to encompass all the slights of a true despotic leader. If, in the beginning, Elle Fanning seems to do nothing but to reprise her performance of Aurora in Maleficent (r. Robert Stromberg, 2014), this instance of The Sleeping Beauty who is locked away in a gilded cage that takes the shape of Russian imperial salons eventually undergoes a significant transformation, which will determine her to reevaluate her ideals and objectives within the court. The allies which she recruits are as diverse as they can be, from Marial (Phoebe Fox), the servant and ex-courtesan who has fallen from grace and Leo, her well-endowed lover (Sebastian de Souza, known for playing Alfonso de Aragon in The Borgias), all the way to Orlo (Sacha Dhawan), the bookworm councilor.

Cultural stereotypes are also present in the show, from vodka being consumed starting with the early hours of the day, the influence of the church in state affairs, the brown bear (the mascot of the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympic Games and a persistent caricatural symbol of the Russian Empire across history), to embalmed leaders (which references the mummy of Lenin and the worshipping of Christian-Orthodox relics). If in reality, Catherine the Great came into power a whole seventeen years after being married, in The Great, the young princess starts conspiring against her royal consort shortly after installing herself in the regal apartments.

The historical inaccuracy (the under-title of the mini-series is “an occasionally true story”) of the series justifies the fact that it highlights Catherine’s coming-of-age­ story as a future progressive leader of the Russian Empire. In a similar fashion to the HBO production, she faces off with the era’s endemic sexism, having many ideological difficulties to face in her enterprise to educate women, and being silenced in public. Her plans to emancipate the Russian society contradict the tenets of Christianity, which undermine the power of women and simply reduce them to their reproductive role. Quite ironically, she proposes a debate on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract to her ladies-in-waiting, but her efforts are received with reticence.

The cinematography, signed by John Brawley, Maja Zamojda, and Anette Haellmigk, favorizes long corridors and natural lighting, which puts to good use the pastel nuances of the brocards and the aristocratic pallor of the character’s skins. The lack of historical accuracy is noticeable through the usage of modern, colloquial language, as well as in regards to set and costume designs. The Great delivers in terms of resplendent decors and suffocating corsets, but few elements seem to indicate the Slavonic background of the story, apart from the Orthodox monastic robes. What is noticeable is the protagonist’s indifference towards fashion, in contrast to Peter, who is the one who gets the most compliments for the way he wears his skirts. After all, the show isn’t even about this, but rather about the development of a strong woman in a milieu that is visually appealing, yet secondary in terms of relevance.

Performed by Nicolas Hoult (who plays Harley in The Favourite), Peter is a monarch that is tempestuous and torn away by the frustration that he isn’t on par with his father’s reputation, Peter the Great. Suffering from obvious Freudian complexes (his idolization for his mother’s mummified corpse is the basis for one of the season’s funniest scenes), the Tzar frequently wears his mother’s pearls assorting them with flamboyant outfits which incorporate skin-tight leather pants and animal prints. Some of the best sources of humor in the show are his social inadequacy and his hedonism which hamper his attempts at achieving a towering status in the name of posterity. Gambling on shock value, the (mostly sexual) insinuations and wordplays in the script are a hilarious source for verbal gags, which are reinforced by situational humor, yet counterbalanced by drama (for example, a scene in which various delicatessen are tasted in the presence of decapitated, frowning heads). The fact that vulgar language is being abused alienates the progressive, no-holds-barred tone, making conspiracies and intrigues seem childish. Idealists such as Catherine and Orlo have problems adapting to a reality that doesn’t coincide with a literary one, as they condemn the very same attitude that the circumstances later force them to reproduce themselves.

Although its historic anachronism and its absurdist humor don’t manage to reach the heights of Monty Python parodies, The Great dotes on the recognition and ridicule of period-age mores, giving them a fresh and liberating twist. The confrontations that take place between the handmaidens and Catherine are worthy of Mean Girls (dir. Mark Waters, 2004) and are welcomingly familiar. These savory exchanges don’t compensate, however, the many opportunities that the script seems to waste. To name a few, the challenge of learning a new language, of adapting to a new, Eastern culture or the conversion to a new religion are some of the major plotlines that the show doesn’t pursue, to the detriment of constructing a more complex protagonist.

If Peter’s legitimacy as a leader is questioned episode by episode, by underlining his defects – he’s a disastrous military strategian (he’s unable to even read a map properly) and a clumsy hunter, the validation of Catherine is supported by the fact that she has assimilated the theories of the era’s greatest thinkers, such as Descartes, Voltaire or Diderot. In this sense, The Great promotes a proto-feminist approach in a time in which “avoiding being raped for another day” is a success for a woman, as Mariel, Catherine’s servant and confidante, candidly declares. The epicurean emperor gifts her a lover in order to cheer her up, and so Catherine takes every chance to skillfully navigate the court’s patriarchal society.

On the same contemporaneous note, the casting of the show is as ethnically diverse as possible, a detail that brings the current politically correct attitudes into play. Although the concept of mixing the present into the task of interpreting a shadowy past isn’t new (Dickinson), the Anglo-Saxon perspective at play here can seem too schematic and poppy for non-English speaking audiences. Even so, the red line which connects the episodes lies in Fanning’s capacity to pass from the image of innocence itself to its simulation, in order to subtly navigate a hostile terrain while also causing some heavy laughter.

First season of “The Great” will be availble on HULU starting with 15th of May.

Andreea Pătru

Film critic and programmer, she collaborates with various international film festivals. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Indiewire, Film Comment, Vague Visages and Desistfilm. In Spanish she has written for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine and in Romanian she collaborates with FILM magazine. Programmer and coordinator of Tenerife Shorts.