In 'Hex,' Clashing Boarding School Cliques With Witches Versus Ghouls
BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: June 15, 2006
If you never liked "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," though you tried to like it but the dialogue seemed uptight, and the glimpses of the sinister past so Halloweeny, and you never fully understood the connection between adolescent alienation and the supernatural because as a teenager you liked realistic stuff that told you how to get by, then you may have a chance to redeem yourself with "Hex."
"Hex" was billed as the British "Buffy" in 2004 when it started on Sky One in Britain. "Buffy" is big there, but "Hex" didn't pass muster with fans of the American show. With its languorous tempo and haphazard mythology, it struck many "Buffy" fans as desultory or, worse, boring, with nothing like the coherence or fire-eyed ardor of "Buffy," Joss Whedon's enshrined series. "Hex" was canceled after two seasons.
But now it's here, Thursdays on BBC America, and it's worth a look. First, it's beautiful: sweeping, with a hazy, dewy finish ideally suited to its shire setting at a magisterial boarding school called Medenham Hall. The school's estate lacks the often cramped, back-lot look of "Buffy," and the evocation of a real climate with unpredictable gusts and lonesome heaths is scarier, to this viewer, than cramped libraries and picturesque churchyards. For one, you can't run away from the big Brontλ-like moors, or at least it takes a long time.
At Medenham are the bad people the popular girls, naturally who are coarse and snobbish, and the good people the misfits, naturally who are emotionally refined, funny, yearning, romantic and sad. The good people are chiefly two: Thelma (Jemima Rooper), a lesbian who looks like a square-jawed Kelly Osbourne, and her roommate, the witchy one, Cassie (Christina Cole), who is distractingly gorgeous, with the coloring of a Swede and the profile of Kate Bosworth. Suffice it to say that no woman who ever looked like this, in the history of women, has ever been a misfit.
There is something weird about Cassie's beauty, however: her hair is too uniformly yellow and ultimately does not belong on a purportedly modest English girl, and her face seems artificially stilled, as if by Botox, or, more precisely, Restylane, which is used to fill in wrinkles and acne scars.
As Manohla Dargis observed in The New York Times, the damage that cosmetic medicine has done to acting has yet to be fully assessed. To have an actress who is supposed to be a teenage witch look partially palsied or numb with no explanation is just not fair to viewers. And viewers, especially the ones being asked to pay keen attention to a show about the uncanny with plenty of close-ups, should not be expected out of decorum? to keep a pact of silence about a central visual feature of their experience.
But let's allow that Cassie's slightly off-kilter beauty contributes to the sense that something is amiss at Medenham. Indeed, it's haunted. That much is immediately clear, though it takes this pleasantly somnolent show a long time to disclose.
Unmysterious and mysterious things keep catching Cassie's eye, including a sexy jerk named Troy (Joseph Morgan) and a sexy ghoul named Azazeal (Michael Fassbender). Azazeal is apparently a fallen angel the history of the school includes a witch-trial scandal and he's stalking Cassie, who seems to have been chosen by the old witch ghosts. Or maybe she is an old witch ghost. In any case, previews suggest that she is about to have "Rosemary's Baby" troubles and be forced to bear a devil-child of some kind.
In the meantime she and Thelma flaunt their rapport, and some of the best parts of the show for American viewers might be simply their dippy, peppy Anglicisms, as well as how harsh the girls can be with each other, in the English way. Friends call one another cow, and sincerely say "blimey"; stockings get laddered; they all have a laugh with their mates.
There's something of the pitiless Etonian stoicism that pervades even this girl-dominated series that works well with magic. No one gets especially psychological, or, rather, psychological explanations seem flighty and are still subordinated to reason and sarcasm. People in the "Hex" world are left to deal with ghosts alone, which is how ghosts should be dealt with.
Last week Thelma died. The vibrant and cerebral character had pined for Cassie, who is apparently not gay, in a way that seemed far beneath her, and her death looked like lovelorn suicide. But we knew that it was Azazeal who killed her and killed any chance for a fully human lesbian character on the show, someone other than a woman who comes around just for a kiss during sweeps week.
Thelma, however, does stick around, but as an undead figure, showing up at her funeral to cheer Cassie on and leaven the scene with some snickery insight. Good for the gays or not? I have trouble calculating these things. British viewers have been ambivalent on this subject, as on most features of this beautiful, intelligent, imperfect show.
Hex
BBC America, tonight at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.
Directed by Brian Grant; Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy, producers; written by Julian Jones. A production of Shine Limited and Sony Pictures Television International
WITH: Christina Cole (Cassie Hughes), Jemima Rooper (Thelma Bates), Michael Fassbender (Azazeal), Colin Salmon (David Tyrel), Anna Wilson-Jones (Jo Watkins), Amber Sainsbury (Roxanne), Zoe Tapper (Gemma), Joseph Morgan (Troy), Jamie Davis (Leon).
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