Available on Paramount+, the series Station Eleven is a cinematographic nugget adapted from a literary gem. While The Last of Us makes the news, it’s time to watch Station Elevenwhich in turn acts as a remedy.
The Last of Us And Station Eleven are both produced by HBO. But they have much more in common: they are each adapted from a work considered a monument. The first is from the cult PlayStation video game, designed by the Naughty Dog studio. The second is taken from the novel by Emily St. John Mandel, published in 2014, a worldwide success and a masterpiece of contemporary literature.
A jewel of striking beauty from every point of view, the adaptation of Station Eleven however, did not get the prominence it deserved. We can understand the first brake, very contextual: the work begins with a devastating pandemic caused by a respiratory disease. Dystopian? Depressing? Station Eleven is certainly not a feel good candy, but it does not respond to such demoralizing qualifiers. On the contrary, Station Eleven is a life raft.
It all begins on a theater stage. Arthur Leander, famous actor, collapses on the boards during a performance of the King Lear. At the same time, the world is rapidly descending into chaos in the face of a deadly flu. And it’s on stage that everything continues: 20 years after the apocalypse, a community of artists called the Traveling Symphony travels through this region of the United States, always following the same road tirelessly, to interpret Shakespeare’s plays.
Several stories and destinies intertwine between these two periods, but linked by a red thread: a comic strip called “Station Eleven”. This is in the hands of Kirsten – a character whose story we follow at the age of 8, at the time of the apocalypse, when she plays a role in the play of the King Lear ; then at 28, as an actress in the Traveling Symphony. Other slices of life, of several protagonists, dot this pre and post-apocalyptic picture, in an unstructured (non-chronological) way.
Surviving is not enough
Emily St. John Mandel’s story is certainly that of an end of the world, but also and above all that of a temporality that knows neither beginning nor end. It’s the end of a world, at most, already sleepwalking, already ghostly. As long as we continue to sing, to paint, to write and to love, the apocalypse has not broken anything. But it has increased the weight of the past – like all these recurring collapses on a human scale, internal or social. To this ontological problem, surviving is not enough from the heroine’s tattoo, Emily St. John Mandel’s answer is art. What Patrick Somerville’s series (The Leftovers, maniac) strives to stage with great accuracy.
The result is an allegorical as well as carnal ode to art. Station Eleven is a liberating initiation to inhabit the world. It is a work that creates meaning, that sporadically harmonizes reality — Kirsten as a child responds to Kirsten as an adult. Art culminates as a fundamental binder in the characters as well as a means of expression. ” Kirsten was in that calm state that she always felt at the end of performances, the feeling of having soared very high and not having completely landed, her soul trying to take flight. “, narrated Mandel. This is what we find in the interpretation delivered by Mackenzie Davis (Kirsten at 8 years old) and Matilda Lawler (Kirsten at 28 years old).
Sometimes suffocating in its staging, as though laden with a weight impossible to formulate at the start, and often melancholy in its writing, it is however in no way an oppressive or gloomy series. SEleven station is an emancipatory journey towards hope, to be discovered and experienced intimately. ” I remember damage. Then escape. Then adrift in a stranger’s galaxy for a long, long time. But I’m safe now. (…) I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die. »
One of the most important novels in contemporary literature has produced an equally sovereign series, terribly powerful and moving. Tears, of course, will flow with each episode. The adaptation will remain, in the eyes of readers of Emily St. John Mandel, an incomplete fresco compared to the novel, in particular as regards the “world before”, and a somewhat heavier approach in form; but it is successful as such. Doubtless it will take on more and more value year after year.
Station Eleven is available in France on the Paramount+ SVOD service (from €7.99).
