Independent Films, Film Profiles

The Handmaid's Tale (film)
by Volker Schlöndorff

The Handmaid's Tale is a 1990 film adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel of the same name. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff the film stars Natasha Richardson (Kate/Offred), Faye Dunaway (Serena Joy), Robert Duvall (The Commander, Fred), Aidan Quinn (Nick), and Elizabeth McGovern (Moira). The screenplay was written by Harold Pinter. The original music score was composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. MGM Home Entertainment released an Avant-Garde Cinema DVD of the film in 2001.In the near future, as war rages across the fictional Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate (Offred in the novel, in which her real name is not specified), sees her husband killed and her daughter kidnapped while trying to escape across the border to Canada. Kate herself is transformed into a Handmaid; a concubine 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 the Old Testament orthodoxy and misogynist cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon finds herself in the home of the Commander and his frosty wife, Serena Joy.Forced to lie between Serena Joy's legs and be sexually penetrated each month by the Commander, Kate longs for her earlier life. She soon learns that since many of the nation's powerful men are as sterile as their wives, she will have to risk the punishment for fornication — death by hanging — in order to be fertilized by another man who can provide her with the pregnancy that has become her sole raison d'être. The other man is Nick, the Commander's sympathetic driver. Kate grows attached to him and eventually pregnant with his child. Only the affiliation of her fellow handmaid, Ofglen, seems to offer any chance of giving her unborn child a life of freedom or finding the daughter she already lost.