Prisoner 951 review – This gritty Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe drama makes Britain look silly | television

“My name is Nazanin, and I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Everyone says that.”

When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe enters an Iranian prison for the first time and introduces herself to a fellow inmate, she feels a sudden chill run deep in her bones. She knows that the Iranian regime has no reason to detain her. But immediately, I learned that it didn’t matter. Meanwhile, back home in London, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, is happily preparing their apartment for her return – flowers on the kitchen table, favorite ice cream in the fridge – blissfully unaware that he will not see his wife for almost six years.

This four-part drama – adapted by Stephen Butchard from the couple’s upcoming book The Sky Court – attempts a difficult task. The horror that ravaged this family between 2016 and 2022 was brutal and infuriatingly banal. In Iran, Nazanin faced a Kafkaesque nightmare at the hands of an unaccountable theocracy. Without knowing it, she was not so much a prisoner as a hostage; A victim of forces that moved before she was born. Meanwhile, in London, Richard faced a British government in flux, which, post-Brexit, was going through a desperate series of ministers, who seemed distracted by the chaos and paralyzed by the gravity of what they faced.

Representing the human trauma at the heart of this deadly perfect storm is a challenge. Butchard’s script makes the best of the fleeting, far-reaching conversations between Nazanin, Richard, and their infant daughter Gabriella, the emptiness surrounding her captors, the casual cruelty of her (female) guards, and the bewilderment of the British diplomats trying to deal with the case. Its success depends on conveying the sense of the tormented interior of the couple during this period. Joseph Fiennes as Richard is a study in both quiet and disturbed pain. Fiennes does an excellent job of portraying the small changes in his behavior as the months turn into years – he becomes sadder but also quicker to anger, resolute but increasingly prone to despair. Shave less. He sleeps more.

Meanwhile, Narges Rashidi is a revelation as Nazanin – a woman forced to live halfway between defiance and defeat; She watches her life and her daughter’s childhood slip through her fingers. Montages and dream sequences play out as the couple attempts to bridge the physical distance between them. Of course, any drama of this kind involves long stretches – and certainly one of the cruelest aspects of this ordeal has been the intense frustration that diplomacy in both Britain and Iran has been moving at an extremely slow pace. Accordingly, this is not so much a thriller as it is a meditation on helplessness – how do you maintain hope when the world seems oblivious to your plight?

There is also a sense of mounting anger as the likely/probable reason (deleted depending on how seriously you take the UK government’s denial) for Nazanin’s detention becomes apparent in the form of a multi-million pound arms debt that Britain has owed Iran since the early 1970s. The government has never acknowledged this as a factor – although it is clearly a strange coincidence that the debt was paid off on the day Nazanin was released.

Throughout the drama, Britain’s position as a not-so-serious nation during this period is reinforced. In a series that is understandably not overflowing with relief, it is good (almost, but not so quickly) that Boris Johnson appears on television in Nazanin Prison. “How could this man be important?” says one of her fellow prisoners incredulously. “It looks like it fell from a bush.”

Of course, Johnson’s role in Nazanin’s continued imprisonment was particularly egregious: by nonchalantly stating in Parliament in 2017 that she was “simply teaching people journalism”, he contradicted the accurate version of events she had presented to the Iranian authorities. We view this incident from Nazanin’s point of view, and this prison perspective profoundly underscores the extent to which Johnson is endangering more than just her freedom. Meanwhile, Richard has the privilege of dealing with the then Foreign Secretary Liz Truss towards the end of Nazanin’s incarceration – there is a darkly comic scene in which Ratcliffe expresses his despair while Truss stares blankly at him like a child being shown a confusing card trick.

Prisoner 951 arrives at a perilous moment – as political forces in the United Kingdom seem to frown upon cross-cultural relations and care little about the possibility of splitting up families. While this drama is driven by anger, it is best understood as a defiant love story. Even as cynical, and ultimately petty, international relations affairs threatened to destroy the happy little world that Nazanin and Richard had built, this multinational, multiethnic extended family – as devoted to each other in Tehran as they were in London – never stopped reminding each other why they could never let that happen.

Nazanin may not have known why she was in prison. But she knew why she needed to get out. This is as good a response to our current distress as can be imagined.