With the echoes of Homeland still resonating in the ears, it’s hard to approach Prisoners of War – the Israeli series upon which Channel 4’s hit US import is based – with an entirely open mind.
Seeing American TV remakes of foreign dramas is hardly a new experience for British viewers, but seeing them before the original is comparatively rare – and seeing one version so soon after the other (Prisoners of War begins in the UK less than a week after Homeland’s final episode) makes it all but impossible to avoid comparisons. However, the differences between the two shows are so marked, despite Gideon Raff’s involvement with both, that each deserves to be viewed on its own merits.
Prisoners of War’s opening episode begins with three members of the Israel Defence Forces, Nimrod (Yoram Toledano), Uri (Ishai Golan), and Amiel (Assi Cohen), being returned home after seventeen years’ captivity in Lebanon. Two of them are traumatised, confused and much changed, but alive; the third, Amiel, is coming back in a box.
Things are very different for their families. Uri’s girlfriend Nurit (Mili Avital) has subsequently married his brother; Nimrod’s wife Talya (Yael Abecassis) has struggled to bring up two children on her own (‘You’re such bad kids,’ she laments on the day of their dad’s return); while Amiel’s sister Yael (Adi Ezroni) dotes on the memory of her missing brother, living alone and caring for his bafflingly large, forty-strong collection of dogs.
Soon, Yael is heartbroken – in a hauntingly effective scene, we see her receive the tragic news of Amiel’s death through the slats of a blind, the window blotting out all the sounds from inside – and fantasizing her brother still alive; Nurit is forced to take Uri back to an anonymous flat, pretend it’s her home, and deny the existence of her husband and son on the instructions of the IDF, who are concerned about how Uri might respond to the news that the girlfriend he left behind his now his sister-in-law; and Talya is trying her best to help her husband come to terms with the fact that he has two teenage kids he doesn’t know.
‘How long do you think it’ll take him to figure we’re completely screwed up?’ ponders daughter Dana (played by Yael Eitan and the only character to share a name with their counterpart in Homeland). If he hasn’t worked it out when she asks him, ‘So, were you raped over there?’ it’ll probably be clear when the girl’s fondness for dope and random internet hook-ups with considerably older men come to light.
Dana in Homeland is only mildly a wild child; Dana in Prisoners of War is bratty and utterly uncontrollable. She also gets all the best – and most inappropriate – lines. ‘Can you imagine if they crashed?’ she asks at the airport gathering of family members awaiting the POWs return. ‘After 17 years, they finally get released and then … BOOM!’ If she found out her old man was a newly-converted Islamic terrorist, she’d probably just blaze up another fat one and laugh.
However, such matters of terrorism and changing faith, so central to Homeland from the very beginning, have no immediate bearing on this story. That the two surviving soldiers have some dark secrets as well as deep-seated problems is clear, but precisely what happened to them during their long years of imprisonment is not.
Furthermore, with only flashes of familiarity from the American remake at the outset (the handshake between Brody and Chris is an identical restaging of a scene between Nimrod and his son, Hatzva; likewise, a scene of a scruffy and bedraggled Uri being offered the chance to shave and eat properly by his captors will be immediately recognisable to fans of Brody’s Mick-Hucknall-fallen-on-hard-times hair and beard combo) it’s difficult to predict where the story’s going.
Unfortunately, because there are some similarities – and as the vast majority of UK viewers will be watching off the back of Homeland – it’s impossible not to try and second guess what parts of the remake were taken directly from the original; and this is a shame, because the slower, starker, quieter and more emotive Prisoners of War is well-deserving of attention in its own right.
Airs at 9.30pm on Thursday 10th May 2012 on Sky Arts 1.
> Order Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.
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