And as the show settles into itself, it’s even more fascinating viewing for the way in which it merges the exhilarating subterfuge required to dodge the occupiers with the small victories that result from these endeavors. The swings from horror to humor make you feel the movement that much more sharply. But this isn’t that kind of winking, self-aware anachronism-it’s not quite clear what it is. Plenty of ahistorical fictions loosely, and cheekily, tied to actual events have appeared in various forms in recent years see: The Great, The Young Pope, The Favourite, etc. And Powley’s Gies appears early on as the kind of free spirit-sleeping in till noon, galavanting all night with her single girlfriends, picking up men in bars, having unguarded conversations with her gay brother about his sexual preferences-that it’s a bit hard to believe mid-century morals would encourage. (The Frank family emigrated from Austria to the Netherlands in 1933.) No one here, thankfully, seems determined to interpret a Dutch accent. Bel Powley, who plays Gies, doesn’t mask her London accent, while Liev Schreiber, playing Otto Frank with heartbreaking gravitas, inflects his speaking voice with the Viennese intonation that Otto Frank would have possessed. It is also hard to watch-at least at first-because the show is poised somewhat awkwardly between historical verisimilitude and embracing a more modern sensibility. A Small Light is hard to watch for all these reasons: You know the story, you know the tragic end.
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