The Honourable Woman: Season 1 (2014)

It’s hard to describe what The Honourable Woman is about, since it seems to set out to convey the near-impossibility, if not the total impossibility, of telling a story about the Middle East. In easily the densest sprawl since The Wire, writer, director and producer Hugo Blick unfurls a global vision that is too complex, convoluted and opaque to recount or summarise – rather, it takes precisely the eight hours of the series to efficiently summarise it - although two of its most memorable flashpoints are Nessa Stein (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an Israeli-English businesswoman, and Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle (Stephen Rea), a MI6 Middle Eastern expert, both of whom find themselves enmeshed in a conspiracy that revolves around fibreoptic traffic in and out of the West Bank. More a communication thriller than an information thriller, its sheer quantity of spatial, temporal and cyberspatial complexity is a riposte to any outsider who presumes to pronounce anything about the Middle East - not so much because they’re outsiders, but because there are no outsiders, no possibility of extricating or isolating anything from the Middle East once you start to talk about it. That might sound like hard work to watch, but the enormity of Blick’s endeavour, the sheer perceptual overload, means that there are moments when it all collapses into post-perceptual aporia, strangely soothing interludes when the camera itself seems to crumple under the sheer weight of its communicative and historical burden into so many silences, absences and vacuums. During those moments of respite, Nessa Stein becomes something of a protagonist – or at least the face of the series, since Gyllenhaal manages to give her a kind of resting crying face, a face that feels as if the moment just before crumpling into grief is the position it naturally adopts under total relaxation and repose. Anything else is an effort, any normal interaction speaks volumes of tears being held back, while her few moments of genuine relaxation and happiness – especially her smiles – seem, by their very definition, on the very verge of turning in on themselves, convulsive as cellophane. In its to and fro with Rea’s micro-expressions, it’s the face of someone who’s been an audience to historical traumas that exceed their individual perception, exceed their very sense of themselves as individuals. And that forces the audience, in turn, to face history, and Middle Eastern history in particular, as the real perceptual horizon of this extraordinary data convocation, the one thing we’re still trying to grasp as a totality, but can’t.