I just finished watching ITV's 3-part drama, "The Last Weekend" by Blake Morrison. I had read the novel and obviously not knowing who Mr Blake was prior to that and then realized some of his novels were made into TV drama. "The Last Weekend" is classified as a psychological thriller. These days, whenever you see 'thriller' as a genre in book or in movie, it normally cannot get away dealing with death, fight or killing. Indeed, the story involved all that.
"The Last Weekend" is set in a rather nice gathering of two couples in a country-house over a bank holiday weekend. It brought out the characters of Ian and Ollie, where their "rivalry" slowly uncovered, which dated back to their school's days. Some reviews of Blake Morrison's novel have been about his clever design on the use of an unreliable narrator to connect and tell the story to the reader. Traditionally, it is in the habit of the reader to believe whatever the narrator said and the messages he tried to convey, but not for this one. In the novel, Ian is the unreliable narrator. You slowly realised, some of the events were not as what it seemed on the surface and certainly Ian himself is the source of the problem, rather than others where he put the blame on. The drama put the setting in the same place, in a rather unusual style, it also continues with Ian as the narrator, connecting the events and the storyline. At times, it felt like a docu-drama, but later it began to make sense towards the end, in that, he is all the while in his own defend of what happened subsequently to Ollie and his wife.
Ian might appear like a nutter, but I have sympathy for him. The reader and the audience won't be able to know how much of the events and the people he described are truly the way they are, because they were all seen through his eyes and he could be biased. Even so, it is clear that he was still very much in love with Ollie's wife, Daisy, in which he claimed he had known her first before Ollie. In the story, we can also see Ian and his Emily are both of a lower social class than Ollie and Daisy. It is interesting and not sure if this is the idea that the author is trying to convey that much of the 'jealosy' of Ian about Ollie is due to these two reasons. To be fair, being human, we are able to feel either envious or jealous about people. It's how we deal with it that matters. The story built on Ian's jealousy of Ollie as the main storyline. His obsession with Daisy as another. The weekend, which is the last the two couples spent together, is where Ian's jealousy grew to the utmost and leads to undesirable consequence which in the end, lose him Ollie, Daisy and his wife, Emily.
Taking a step back, if we were to 'simulate' the lifestyle of Ian. This means, taking a different look at Ian and his likely lifestyle. Ian could be quite a decent bloke. It is only his 'darkside' that needs managing. If I were Ian, I would be more aware of that and I would move away from it because I know that won't be nice and would affect people. This means I will see less of Ollie and his wife or try not getting 'too involved'. Yes, it will be hard on the friendship, but we do made choices in life, don't we? I often like to see the way forward as best as possible. If any drama or novel that could be "educational" as well as "entertaining", it would serve useful purpose. The novel, being a novel, seems to have portrayed other characters to be "overly nice". But in real life, they need not be because some inappropriate sexual gesture of Ian on Daisy, which started off quite early on, should have been violently stopped, but it didn't. Therefore, perhaps the story is also helping the readers/audiences to be aware about people like that around, and to avoid them as much as possible.This may be a minor point, but I still think is important.
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