Besźel Don't Know Bout Ul Qoma

March 29, 2018 6:32 PM

Great scene-setting trailer for the BBC Two adaptation of China Mieville's The City And The City. If you prefer live action to atmos, there's an equally promising one containing David Morrissey in a beard too.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue (24 comments total)

Bugger, forgot to mention that the 4 part series starts next Friday.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 6:33 PM on March 29, 2018

Oh wow, this should be interesting. Another book that I considered unfilmable, be curious to see how they make it work!
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 6:39 PM on March 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wow - unexpected. I listened to this one on audio book and completely enjoyed it.
posted by parki at 6:43 PM on March 29, 2018

So you guys know, I'm a premature-posting muppet and I double-linked the same trailer. Have emailed mods but the first link should actually be this Fallout-y public information trailer.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 6:44 PM on March 29, 2018

This book and Kraken are maybe China Mieville's least brutal/easiest to enjoy, I think? Really looking forward to this, and would love to see a big budget series adaptation of the Bas-Lag novels.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 6:55 PM on March 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

Oooh.
posted by Artw at 7:05 PM on March 29, 2018

Aaaaagh i'm excited / worried about this. It's one of my favorite novels!
posted by moonmilk at 7:06 PM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Much as I love the book, I'll admit wariness at this adaptation. If they are going so far as to describe the nature of Breach in ads for the show, they're robbing the reader of one of the real joys of piecing together what is happening in the novel.
posted by belarius at 7:12 PM on March 29, 2018 [11 favorites]

Yeah, I'm wary too. Unseeing is going to be a really hard thing to get right - I'm not sure the technique of blurring things that are supposed to be unseen is satisfactory to me.
posted by capricorn at 7:41 PM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

The City and the City is my favorite book. It is very, very hard for me to imagine it working as a TV show though, partly because it is such a heavy-handed allegory. (But Children of Men worked, so who knows.)
posted by miyabo at 8:02 PM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Only read it once and that was not long after it came out. Am torn between re-reading before or after watching.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 8:04 PM on March 29, 2018

I think I mentioned The City & The City in one of the "which book do you want to see adapted" Metatalktails threads. I'm definitely not convinced that it's filmable, but if it is I want to see what that looks like.
posted by egregious theorem at 8:07 PM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

The trailers feel like they've really given up on how the book presented the mystery to the reader and just gone a different way. The different colours of visual style looks interesting at least.

I wonder if TC&TC could be adapted into a game that messes with the player's perceptions by gradually changing how unseen things around them start out completely obscured but resolve as the player gets more breach-y.
posted by allegedly at 8:19 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

I definitely need to re-read. And I definitely need to watch. No matter how it's done, there's going to be any number of somethings that will be interesting and thought-provoking.
posted by ashbury at 8:36 PM on March 29, 2018

*kermit flail of excite*
posted by A hidden well at 8:43 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

I hated that first trailer for reasons already discussed, but actually in the second I was surprised to discover I rather liked the blurring -- I hadn't thought of that as a potential visual solution to the unfilmableness, and for the few instants it turns up it seemed like a surprisingly plausible representation of how one could psychologically see and not see what needed avoiding.

Relatedly, there's still just enough time to binge the 9 extant episodes of Counterpart before the April 1 finale. Much as I love The City and the City, it's hard to imagine the TV version can surpass the current masterpiece of Eastern European city-double SF.
posted by chortly at 9:00 PM on March 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

The City and The City is, unabashedly, my most favorite Mieville novel, and I should buy a copy to keep forever.

If they don't mess it up, this adaptation's existence is a good thing.
posted by Quackles at 9:58 PM on March 29, 2018

I feel that a really skillful director/editor/set-design team could make handling the cities a masterclass in cinematography. The kind of thing that's referenced endlessly from then on.

So... I don't have high hopes for this adaptation. Still, fingers crossed, expectations kept low to hopefully be matched and exceeded, and I should buy this book as well.
posted by tychotesla at 10:06 PM on March 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

One of my all-time favorite books! The slow reveal that you aren't reading fantasy or magic realism or anything, just a book about bureaucracy, is so well-handled it's like a magic trick. It needs another genre to describe it. I don't think the story itself is compelling enough to hold a narrative if it shows all its cards in the trailer, but I do like the vibe of the propaganda trailer.

As for blurring - I'd love to see them use the trick where the camera focuses on something, while a key element is just out-of-focus in the background or otherwise de-emphasized. Like the Librarian in It. (Warning: heebie jeebies. )
posted by Emily's Fist at 11:45 PM on March 29, 2018

Meanwhile, in a previous Metafilter thread, everyone plots out Sex and the City and the City.
posted by Emily's Fist at 11:58 PM on March 29, 2018 [6 favorites]

> "It needs another genre to describe it."

I've decided it's Ruritanian Romance, because why the hell not.
posted by kyrademon at 6:15 AM on March 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

Love the book, but this looks...disappointing. The whole reason that the central conceit works is because it's presented so subtly and just fades into the background as accepted reality, which is only slowly unveiled to the reader. It doesn't just lose potency as storytelling; it also undermines what's interesting about the book politically and philosophically.

Although the trailer does provide a perfect example of how people unsee things: I have to force my brain to unsee all those misplaced diacritics and cyrillic lettering, as I'm struggling to read it as "BREACH" instead of..."VREH-DSN"
posted by adso at 2:05 PM on March 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

Count me among those who don't really think this is a filmable book.

I'll still watch the shit out of it.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:00 PM on March 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

In case anyone's still paying attention to this post, it turns out that although only the first episode was shown on telly tonight all four are available on iPlayer for your bingeing pleasure. No prizes for guessing what I'm doing right now.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 6:23 PM on April 6, 2018 [1 favorite]