Berkeley Square
Berkeley Square
| 09 May 1998 (USA)
SEASON & EPISODES
  • 1
  • Reviews
    StunnaKrypto

    Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

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    Taha Avalos

    The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

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    Lela

    The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

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    Phillipa

    Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

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    Syl

    The British series crossed the line in one of the later episodes into soap opera plot lines. The three nannies are well-played and are unique and different. Mattie is the solid, moral nanny. She must deal with the manipulative Mrs. McCluskey (played excellently by Kate Williams in this role). It's interesting to see how the households in upscale Berkeley Square run quite differently. The townhouses are really organized by the staff. Relationships between staff and employer is pretty well looked down upon by the upscale upper classes. The families are uniquely different. Hannah has a history and baggage. She is far more complicated and intriguing than the other two nannies. She must deal with Nanny Simmons (well played b Ruth Sheen). Then there is Lydia who comes from a small farming village and must work beside Nanny Collins (played wonderfully by Rosemary Leach). The cast is first rate but the writing is very melodramatic. The art direction and costumes are first rate.

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    VReviews

    "Berkeley Square" is an Edwardian period piece with an "Upstairs, Downstairs" flavor to it. London's Berkeley Square of the 1800's (as it still is today) was a genteel residential area situated around a central neighborhood park. Here is where upper class families and their servants lived their lives with what turns out to be very little privacy. "Berkeley Square" centers around three nannies and the difficult task of living in residence, and maintaining some semblance of a personal life. Unfortunately for the nannies, their personal lives often intersect disastrously with that of their wealthy employers.The casting and acting is quite good. The Edwardian fashions reflect the period perfectly, and the ups and downs of the nannies relationships illustrate the class driven society, it's rules, and it's casualties for both the genteel and working class. An enjoyable production, with the only drawback being that the series was canceled; leaving the last episode hastily packaged up leaving plot lines dangling, and a desire for more that can't be satisfied.

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    jzappa

    Lydia Weston, Hannah Randall and Matty Wickham arrive in Berkeley Square as nannies for their new employers. Berkeley Square begins in a Scorsesean manner. Its first episode, not at all like many other English expositions, is kept at a crisp pace with ambiance changing distinctly from one shot to another. It would rather slow down in the middle, but that slow period is not so slow as it is leisurely, aligning itself with the scope it is allowed to magnify the lives and character developments by at least three times the amount it could have were it not an original mini-series and rather a feature film. It is a great story to be told in a visual medium, on account of its locale, its ensemble potential and the effects of its episodic nature, yet a two- or three-hour movie would hardly fulfill the scope and measure of it.One can only love dearly these women. They each are distinctively different from each other, poles apart even, and there is an air of pressure released from the screen when we grow to care desperately about one, who arrives in London with her illegitimate baby after she is forced to flee Yorkshire by her angry neighbors, and are delivered into the next scene and it involves an assertive young selfhood-concerned recently hired nanny, whose life is only beginning to ground the roots of such a degree of dilemma. But that grows to be the director's leg up in augmenting our emotional involvement to a sizable enhancement.Being a miniseries, we can almost be promised top-notch acting, the actors having a considerably larger amount of time to immerse themselves in their roles, and in Berkeley Square, whether or not that is the case, that is fortunately almost irrelevant due to this being the most English production I have seen in a very long time. And so, the technical film-making is always temperate in the degree to which it draws attention to any existence behind the camera, if perceptible at all, the production design is not only realistic but entirely authentic, and the acting is first-class. All of it. Playing the Polish landlady of the former of the recent nanny I mentioned is an actress named Etela Pardo, who unjustly became nothing more than a completely unknown character actress for television. In consideration of the entire first- rate cast, Etela Pardo deserves special recognition for her heartbreaking powerhouse performance.Lydia Weston is the young Devon farm girl, who has surprisingly been hired to replace the aging Nanny, in the London house of an Earl and Countess, whose social circle includes an upper-crust couple of utterly selfish social climbers whose problems are all self-inflicted and shallow. We care a great deal about peripheral characters, and love, hate and understand all of them. Berkeley Square has enough time for colossal mood swings. There is almost unbearable tragedy, and there is farce. Berkeley Square must not merely be judged by its seemingly scarce target audience who admires BBC miniseries about the snootiest high society of historical England. It must be seen for its story, a beautiful, cataclysmal, epic, sweeping capsule of a microcosm of everything in life we know and understand.

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    moonbeam-1

    I am a great fan of period piece mini series in general and especially ones produced by the BBC. Since purchasing this mini series I've watched it numerous times and highly recommend it. The storyline pulls you in and keeps you there. My only objection to this production is that it seems to end too abruptly and leaves you feeling like there should be more, more, more. I hope they continue the story someday soon.

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