Once upon a time in the recent future a country went wrong.
"Kind of like walking into the past, don't you think?" That's what Robert Duvall, as a high-ranking commander in the repressive religious society in The Handmaid's Tale, says to his handmaid/mistress Natasha Richardson when he smuggles her into Jezebel's, an illicit nightclub/house of prostitution where the elite go to sow their wild oats away from their frigid wives. When it was released in 1990, Duvall was most likely referring to the songs on the soundtrack and the fashions worn by the extras, but now he could just as easily be talking about the film itself, which was released 20 years ago today. And while its vision of the "recent future" may not have come to pass, it's still damned chilling to watch it play out, especially since it's treated in such a matter-of-fact fashion.
Adapted by Harold Pinter from the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale was directed by Volker Schlöndorff, who had previously won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for his 1979 film The Tin Drum, which is about a young German boy who wills himself to stop growing as a protest against the Nazi movement. In this film, Richardson plays a woman whose body has been co-opted by the government because she is capable of having children in a time when 99% of females are infertile. After being captured at the border while trying to escape with her husband and young daughter, Richardson is indoctrinated by Victoria Tennant and put in an untenable situation when she's chosen to bear a child for power couple Duvall and Faye Dunaway (whose participation in the degrading procreation ceremony is distracting to say the least). There are pockets of resistance, though, represented by Elizabeth McGovern's defiant lesbian, and Richardson finds love in the unlikely arms of Duvall's hunky chauffeur, Aidan Quinn. Meanwhile, we witness through her eyes just how frightening a color-coded society run by right-wing fundamentalists would be. To say it's not a pretty sight is putting it mildly.