#Online 2017 film tulip fever series#

It’s not wholly awful (look, I gave it two stars!). DeHaan just doesn’t demonstrate the range to seem like anything but a very young man who fancies the mistress of the house.

Vikander is, in her less lurid moments, good. Naturally he and Sophia develop a mutual obsession for each other, and soon she’s visiting his artist’s garret to lie naked on the bed while he draws her (at this point I half-expected her to intone “paint me like one of your Dutch cheeses, Jan!”) The actual mania for hugely overpriced tulips looks positively restrained compared to the plan cooked up by Sophia and Maria, as a baby is passed off as someone else’s through several months of pregnancy and a woman fakes her own death and is nailed into a coffin.Īnd the catalyst for this is a portrait of Sophia and her husband, by Jan (Dane DeHaan), a young painter, considered good but lacking obsession.

#Online 2017 film tulip fever series#

The plot is astonishing, and if you remember a series called Footballers’ Wives on UK TV about 15 years ago, which jumped the shark so often it should have been set in an aquarium, imagine that with added ruffs. Other characters, some played by well-known actors, are either dull or only pop in momentarily – Johnny Vegas appears for about three seconds. The Abbess sees everything and is an astute businesswoman (they cultivate the very tulips which are sending the backroom auction houses of Amsterdam wild), with a religious quote or allegory for every occasion (my favourite being “God hates mopers”). But topping them all is the Abbess (Judi Dench) heading the nunnery from where the orphan Sophia was married off. Their housemaid Maria (Holliday Grainger) is a bouncy, cheery delight, though life has forced her to develop a core of steel. He doesn’t seem like a bad choice of husband for a woman in those times, as long as you’re prepared to do all the work during sex. He’s a man who underneath his privileged exterior is diffident and easily hurt. Sophia (Alicia Vikander), the heroine, comes across as insipid, though her boorish husband Cornelis (an excellent Christoph Waltz, more layered than – sorry – a tulip bulb), a much older merchant who calls his penis his “little soldier”, is actually rather moving. There aren’t that many stand-out characters in Tulip Fever. Of course with the shadow of HW over this movie, it’s hard not to see Sorgh as a position-abusing sleazeball. I know, it sounds bad, but he’s actually incredibly engaging, and responds well to a slap across the face.

Not only has Weinstein sullied the film but also one of the funniest characters in it – the opportunistic Dr Sorgh (Tom Hollander) who helps women conceive by actually having sex with them. I’m not really a fan of Tulip Fever either, a film that seems to have been in production, post-production and post-post-production for a few centuries itself.Ĭaught up in producer Harvey Weinstein’s downfall, it’s been tainted ever since, only now being released in the UK. They collapse in vases really quickly and look awful as the petals drop. Many of us devoured a 19th century publication called Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds, engagingly written by Charles Mackay – especially the chapter on the 17th century Tulip Mania, when huge sums were paid for tulip bulbs, especially those with rare colour combinations. Using our unexpected leisure time to trawl back through history looking for similar situations which would make us feel both better and more stupid for not recognising what was happening, we discovered that there had been plenty of bubbles before – when the richest and poorest went slightly mad, before the bottom fell out of the market, resulting in disaster for many. *** Read my interview with Tulip Fever’s Oscar-winning costume designer Michael O’Connor ***Īround the turn of the 21st century we suffered the first dotcom crash, and new media employees like me went from working for start-up companies worth millions to unemployment and wondering why we had thought any of it was sustainable.