The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale (DVD) (*)

$21.99

Screened, competed or awarded at:
Berlin International Film Festival
Other Film Festival Awards

Language Selections:
English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )

Product Origin/Format:
Australia ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
109 min

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.78:1)

Special Features:
Interactive Menu

Movie filmed in 1990 and produced in:
Germany ( Germany, Central Europe )
United States ( USA, Canada )

Directed By:
Volker Schlöndorff

Written By:
Margaret Atwood
Harold Pinter

Actors:
Natasha Richardson ..... Kate /
Offred ..... Serena Joy
Faye Dunaway ..... Nick
Aidan Quinn ..... Moira
Elizabeth McGovern ..... Aunt Lydia
Victoria Tennant ..... Commander
Robert Duvall ..... Ofglen
Blanche Baker ..... Janine / Ofwarren
Traci Lind ..... Aunt Helena
Zoey Wilson ..... Aunt Elizabeth
Kathryn Doby ..... Luke (as Rainer Schoene)
Reiner Schöne ..... Cora
Lucia Hartpeng ..... Aunt Sara
Karma Ibsen Riley ..... Rita
Lucile McIntyre ..... Officer on Bus
Gary Bullock

Synopsis:

A science-fiction film set in a dystopian world, where a Christian fundamentalist right-wing government is in power during a time when pollution and other problems have caused mass human sterility. In the society women have lost all human rights and those women who can still conceive are often forced to become 'handmaids'. Kate is caught trying to cross the border and her husband is shot and her little girl lost. As a woman capable of bearing children she is taken to a centre where she is subjected to a barage of indoctrination and made into a 'handmaid'. She is allocated to a powerful member of the government to produce a child with him. His wife is jealous and resents her, although desperately wants her to produce a child for them. Kate is attracted to a Security Guard, and she becomes pregnant by him. She also learns of a Resistance movement through another handmaid. She assassinates the government official, and with the help of the Security guard, escapes into the mountains.

In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife and mother becomes the childbearing pawn of a Christian theocracy. In the near future, as war rages across the fictional North American Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate (Natasha Richardson) sees her husband killed and her daughter kidnapped while trying to escape across the border. Kate herself is transformed into a handmaid -- a surrogate mother for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country's fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the bizarre cult of the handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy and misogynist cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon finds herself ensconced at the home of the Commander (Robert Duvall) and his frosty wife, Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway). Forced to lie between Serena Joy's legs and be penetrated impersonally each month by the Commander, Kate longs for her vanished earlier life; she soon learns that since many of the nation's powerful men are as sterile as their wives, she may have to risk the punishment for fornication -- death by hanging -- in order to sleep with another man who can provide her with the pregnancy that has become her sole raison d'Ãªtre. When that other man turns out to be Nick (Aidan Quinn), the Commander's handsome, sympathetic driver, Kate grows attached to him -- and eventually pregnant with his child. Only the mysterious rebel affiliations of her fellow handmaid, Ofglen (Blanche Baker), seem to offer any chance of giving her unborn child a life of freedom -- or finding the daughter she already lost. Loosely adapted by Harold Pinter from the novel by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale also features Elizabeth McGovern in a small but pivotal role as Moira, a 'gender traitor' who befriends Kate at the handmaids' reprogramming center.

A futuristic tale of a society in which women are forced into surrogate motherhood.

This product was added to our catalog on Saturday 16 May, 2009.

Customers who bought this product also purchased

A Proper Scandal (DVD)	The Whore (2010) (DVD)	Way Back Home (DVD)
Voyager (DVD)	Tonight and Every Night (DVD)	Up in Central Park (DVD)