China Miéville, Tony Grisoni, and Tom Shankland, 2018
If you had asked me ten years ago, back when I was still making my living adapting existing works into screenplays, what book I might like to tackle next, China Miéville’s The City & The City might well have been at the top of the list. I felt like I had a pretty good sense of how to pull it off, including how to film the central premise of the book: that there are two cities sharing the same physical location, with residents of one trained from birth to mentally block out the presence of the other. So if I had stayed in the business, I might actually have been disappointed to discover that the BBC had scooped me with this adaptation—not a movie, but a four-part miniseries. But my involvement in the film world is ancient history now, so I could watch this with no professional jealousy hampering my experience. My disappointment was purely because it wasn’t as good as it could have been.
One problem is something I complained about just recently: like The Death of Stalin, this is way too British. We’re supposed to be in the Balkans. If you don’t want to alienate the audience by translating the dialogue into the fictitious languages of Besź and Illitan, you can at least have the Besź speakers sound vaguely Slavic and the Illitan speakers sound vaguely Turkish. What you don’t do is say, oh, I want this character to sound like she’s from the working class, so I’ll give her a Cockney accent so thick as to make her dialogue nearly incomprehensible. A Cockney accent doesn’t make a character sound working class. It makes her sound Cockney. Besźel is supposed to be crosshatched with Ul Qoma, not Shoreditch.
Another problem is that The City & The City is a murder mystery, and the TV people decided to give the protagonist, Inspector Borlú, a backstory involving a wife who had died under circumstances very similar to those of the murder victim in the main story. You know, to make it personal. Because in TV land, having made a career of identifying and apprehending murderers is apparently not enough motivation for a police detective to identify and apprehend a murderer. I remember receiving notes along these lines—like, literally “give this character a dead family member who this other character will remind him of”. I don’t miss those.
But the main problem, to my mind, is that the miniseries doesn’t really draw parallels between the way the characters in Besźel and Ul Qoma “unsee” the other city and the way that we out here in the real world are trained, or train ourselves, to “unsee” much of the world around us. (My article about the book goes into this, so I won’t repeat the whole spiel here.) I browsed some reviews and saw that many of them complained that the premise of the series was too confusing, and while I think there is value in following Miéville’s lead in revealing it gradually, there should come a point, perhaps near the end of the first episode, when someone spells it out. Drawing parallels for the visiting Americans (for there are some in the story) strikes me as a good way to dispel confusion and add thematic weight to the story at the same time. Some might argue that doing so would undermine the story by speaking the subtext, but as the new version of Pattern 18 explains, over the years I have changed my mind about that—impact depends on clarity, and the reviews suggest that some additional clarity would have been a plus. In the novel there is a chase scene ending with a gunshot that could have been an all-time classic sequence if filmed correctly, but for it to work the audience needs to know exactly what is happening as it happens. The miniseries tries, but there’s slightly too much “Wait, what am I looking at here exactly?” for the sequence to really land.
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