14 February has come, and the first few episodes of "The New Look" have been released. I've looked through Episodes 1 and 2, which clarify matters:
- The caps from the trailer do not actually show the arrest scene -- in the scene from the trailer, Maisie is saved by resistance fighters who shoot the two German soldiers who are molesting her. The actual arrest is right at the end of Episode 1, but not shown on screen.
- There are two types of tortures during Maisie's captivity with the Gestapo in Episode 2. The longer and more explicitly shown scene has Maisie forced to kneel in a stress position with her wrists cuffed to her ankles while a Nazi officer is asking questions and gloating. See caps below. Interspersed between two separate scenes of her in this hogcuffed kneeling scene is a brief scene where she is dunked into a bathub full of ice water, but it's barely visible and not worth preparing caps. Episode 2 ends with Maisie in a freight car with other prisoners on the way to the concentration camp in Germany.
- I have not yet found an online source for Episode 3 (I'm not an Apple+ subscriber), but from a promotional interview with Maisie I understand that it shows her head being shaved on arrival at the concentration camp (which also happened to the historical Catherine Dior). It's Maisie's actual hair that is being shaved off on screen -- some of you may remember her dramatic change of hairstyle in 2022, which was caused by filming this scene. I'd like to see that scene which no doubt will be clipped and appear online soon.
Here are my caps of the hogcuffed kneeling scene:
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She keeps her clothes on during the torture scenes (including the water torture), but there is a short nude scene including an even shorter nipple flash in Episode 1, which has already been clipped and uploaded on Aznude:
Thanks to
@ees001 for the link to the series download for "The New Look" in English -- much better than my previous source.
I've now caught up to Ep. 06 which was released earlier today, and I think this probably concludes the Catherine Dior (Maisie Williams) nazi torture/concentration camp story line barring some further flashbacks in future episodes.
Following on from my earlier post up from Ep. 01 and 02, the story continues with lengthy (and boring) scenes with Christian Dior and Coco Chanel compromising themselves to a greater (Chanel) or lesser (Dior) extent living and working in luxury during the wartime occupation of Paris, interspersed with short sharp scenes showing Maisie's much more interesting parallel story line in captivity.
Ep. 03 has three scenes of interest (cut up and spread through the running time of the episode):
1. On arrival in Germany by train, Maisie and the other female prisoners are herded through an old railroad yard over uneven cobbles and various debris. Maisie is still wearing her high heels from the time of her arrest and loses her footing. A German soldier shouts at her to get up again at gun point, which she does. Seconds later, another solider deliberately trips up another woman, kicks her in the chest as she's trying to get up and shoots her at point blank range. Quite a graphic shooting scene, especially when watched frame-by-frame, as they have used CGI to add the gun blast and the passage of bullet and blood bursting through the back of the body.
2. The prisoners are then registered individually, told to strip to their underwear (Maisie wimps out by getting to keep her satin slip on), issued with prison dresses, then have their hair cropped short (not shaved, as I had been led to believe). Again, Maisie's treatment doesn't quite live up to how it was trailed. Yes, we may see her own hair being cut on screen, but when we see it cut it's still mid-length. The more drastic haircut down to stubble is off-screen.
3. After processing is completed, Maise and the other prisoners are herded at nighttime through the gates of Ravensbrück concentration camp (an all-female camp), giving us our first glimpse of Maisie's new hair style.
Here are my screencaps of the processing, stripping and hair cropping sequence -- I'll post the shooting scene caps later. As per my recent discussion with
@Wragg earlier in this thread, I'm posting 10 images as the sequence tells a story. All 10 pictures combined are only 325k in total anyway, so data use should be minimal.
Following on from this, the German occupation of Paris ends in Ep. 04, which does not feature Maisie at all. She makes her next appearance in the very last frame of Ep. 05, arriving back at her brother's appartment after the liberation of Ravensbrück camp, with uneven stubble on her scalp, emaciated and broken. In Ep. 06, Dior tries to nurture his sister back to strength but she is having episodes of PTSD and flashbacks to her torture by the SS: she gets tortured by sleep deprivation (which is not very visual) and by submerging in a bath of ice water (visually more rewarding). Very brief scenes, but worth a couple of caps. By the end of the episodes, she gets some closure when the young resistance fighter whose name she did not divulge under torture seeks her out and thanks her for saving his life.
All in all, a quite well handled and shot storyline, following the historical record pretty closely as far as I can tell. It only comes to less than ten minutes of film on Maisie's story though, spread over five episodes. The rest of the series is much less involving. I particularly found it grating that all the actors are speaking English with ridiculous faux-French accents, which breaks my suspension of disbelief. Inspector Clouseau comes to mind...
Also a waste of John Malkovich's acting talents as he has little to do but making camp exclamations.