Body & Soul (1994 British TV)

Body and Soul is a British mini-series which was seen in the USA in 1994 on PBS's Masterpiece Theater.

Kristin Scott Thomas plays an intelligent 34 year old nun who has been in a convent since she was 18. When her brother dies unexpectedly, she is forced to re-enter the world temporarily in order to save her family's business.

Once away from the cloister, she has an awakening of her body and her soul, as you might suspect from the title. Away from her ascetic order, she learns to smell beautiful flowers, to make meaningful contact with people, to touch or hug her friends and family and, most important, to ride the baloney pony. The last part is especially useful, since she has also been meditating and praying for guidance about her ever-escalating desire to have a child, which is a rather difficult thing to do when behind the walls of a cloistered order of women.

By the end of the film, she's a big wheeler-dealer, cutting sleazy ten figure mergers and acquisitions with Third World dictators, smoking Havana cigars, boozing it up wildly, exploiting the emerging nations for cheap labor, despoiling the environment, and throwing long term employees out on their asses when they look at her cross-eyed. Not to mention the baloney pony riding.

OK, I made up or exaggerated the details in the last paragraph. She doesn't turn into a Harold Robbins character, but she does learn to face her more difficult and worldly business duties with efficiency and professional detachment, and finally has to decide whether to return to her convent, a decision made more difficult by the order's dependence on her intelligence and leadership, and by the adoration of a younger nun who begs her to return.

NUDITY REPORT

Kristin Scott Thomas does full frontal nudity in two different scenes.

VHS info from Amazon (not available on DVD)

It is a typically sturdy and serious British drama, bordering on melodrama, and is recommended if you really are interested in watching five hours of this kind of material. I watched it, of course, to see Kristin Scott Thomas naked.

The Critics Vote

The People Vote ...

IMDB summary. IMDb voters score it an astronomical 8.7, but there are only 32 votes recorded.

The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

My own guideline: A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. C means it will only appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover appeal. (C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by genre fans, while C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie although genre addicts find it watchable). D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre. F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-.

Based on this description, this film is a C+. It is an award winning mini-series. It is also five hours long, much of it taking place in a silent convent, and completely devoid of humor, so it is for a tiny niche audience.