Color does much of the work in HBO’s Catherine the Great. Set mostly in the luxurious palace of the eponymous Russian empress (Helen Mirren), the miniseries is awash in greens, reds, yellows, and golds. The men on Catherine’s council wear creamy pastel suits, and she gives speeches from a candle-lit balcony overlooking a great hall, surrounded by stained glass and ornate arches. When, in the first of four episodes, she stands on the balcony and declares that “slavery does not have to be a Russian institution,” the sequence’s color palette and blocking define the social order that Catherine leads and aims to upend. Below her, lords dressed in black and white gasp at her intention to abolish serfdom. Behind her stands her court, poised to either die for her or stab her in the back. Nothing exists above her except Christ, painted on a palace wall. Where Christ’s arms are outstretched and welcoming, Catherine places her hands firmly on the podium in front of her, not asking but demanding.
The camera tends to linger on Catherine throughout the series. During a conversation between Catherine and her lady-in-waiting and confidant, Praskovya Bruce (Gina McKee), the frame stays focused on her and leaves Bruce off screen, as though the latter’s sole purpose is to elicit a reaction from the empress. Catherine rules in absence too. Couriers relay letters in wide shots whose stunning landscapes subtly remind us that every piece of this sprawling empire belongs to Catherine. Her most treasured possession is Grigory Potemkin (Jason Clarke), a forthright military leader who becomes her primary lover after her husband, Peter III, is overthrown and made to disappear. Each episode trots out a new young boy toy to please Catherine—relationships here are radically open—but she’s spellbound by Potemkin and he’s enthralled by her. He vows, repeatedly, that all he does is done to honor her.
Political plotlines come and go, with various parties reaching for the throne, including Catherine’s ambitious but incompetent son, Paul (Joseph Quinn); his tutor and Catherine’s advisor, Nikita Ivanovich Panin (Rory Kinnear); and Catherine’s spurned lover, Grigory Orlov (Richard Roxburgh), who led the coup that deposed her husband. But Catherine and Potemkin’s combustive romance, depicted in the long-term as the series jumps forward years at a time, is the heart of the matter. Potemkin goes to war for Catherine, fighting the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus, and he comes back stormy, with a mustache and an eyepatch. Each military expedition wins more glory for Potemkin and Catherine and puts a greater strain on his psyche and their relationship. Later in life, the couple gets into an especially vicious shouting match, both roaring almost incomprehensibly. The dialogue that penetrates the haze is Potemkin’s. “Might I remind you,” he yells, “I waded through blood for you.”
At one point in the series, a sudden close-up on Catherine’s strained face communicates her intense paranoia, like something from a Smeagol-Gollum back-and-forth in The Lord of the Rings. But after Potemkin secures her affection, the world of Catherine the Great far more frequently reflects his perspective. When he stumbles back into the palace following a night out drinking with the court fool (Clive Russell), the shot is blurry and disorienting. And when fireworks celebrate Potemkin’s military victories, the fanfare eerily resembles combat, a crushing manifestation of the trauma he’s experienced. The fireworks crackling in the sky cause the Winter Palace to appear aflame, their eruption sounding like gunfire.
Potemkin is certainly captivating, but the emphasis on him is awkward. Even Catherine’s intimate discussions with her lady-in-waiting end up highlighting him, with the two women praising his handsomeness or damning his difficulty. Catherine the Great largely leaves the empress in the realm of abstraction; its primary use for her is as a symbol of absolute power. “I am the state,” she tells Potemkin, and though Russia changes—the poor and oppressed begin to mobilize in opposition to their abuse—Catherine does not. She repeatedly speaks of the need for equality but backs down when the backlash from the aristocracy threatens her security. She clings to the throne with relentless fervor. She grows only in age.
Catherine’s lack of change, along with her consistent ability to outmaneuver her political opponents, robs the series of momentum despite the astonishing range of Mirren and Clarke’s performances. No threat to Catherine’s reign is ever serious, no geopolitical conflict ever out of her or Potemkin’s control. Conspiracies and wars serve merely to punctuate the show’s development of the romance at its core. That love story, however, doesn’t evolve much either. The couple clashes and makes up and laughs, and then does so again weeks or months or years later. The relationship provides glimpses into Catherine’s motivations for hoarding power and keeping her family and friends—and Potemkin—at an insurmountable distance, but she’s left unlit beyond it. While Catherine the Great is utterly mesmerizing to take in, beneath its aesthetic splendor lie vast, unplumbed depths.
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