the handmaid's tale

Director: volker schlöndorff

Actor: natasha richardson,faye dunaway,aidan quinn,elizabeth mcgovern

Data Published: Thu Feb 15 1990

Genres: Drama,Romance,Sci-Fi,Thriller

Key Words: fundamentalist religion,dystopia,pantyhose,impregnation,totalitarian state

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099731/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale_(film)

Description: The Handmaid's Tale is a movie starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, and Aidan Quinn. In a dystopian, polluted right wing religious tyranny, a young woman is put in sexual slavery on account of her now rare fertility.

Plot: In the near future, war rages across the Republic of Gilead—formerly the United States of America—and pollution has rendered 99% of the population sterile. Kate is a woman who attempts to emigrate to Canada with her husband and daughter. As they take a dirt road, the Gilead Border Guard order them to turn back or they will open fire. Kate's husband uses an automatic rifle to draw the fire, telling Kate to run, but he gets shot. Kate gets captured, while their daughter wanders off into the backcountry, confused and unaccompanied. The authorities take Kate to a training facility with several other women, where she and her companions receive training to become Handmaids—concubines for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country's religious fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the cult of the Handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy with 12-step scripted group chanting and ritualized violence, Kate is soon assigned to the home of "the Commander" (Fred) and of his cold, inflexible wife, Serena Joy. There she is named "Offred"—"of Fred". Her role as the Commander's latest concubine is emotionless. She lies between Serena Joy's legs while being raped by the Commander in the collective hope that she will bear them a child. Kate continually longs for her earlier life, but she is haunted by nightmares of her husband's death and of her daughter's disappearance. A doctor tells her that many of Gilead's male leaders are as sterile as their wives. Serena Joy desperately wants a baby, so she convinces Kate to risk the punishment for fornication—death by hanging—in order to be fertilized by another man who may make her pregnant, and consequently, spare her life. In exchange for Kate agreeing to this, Serena Joy provides information to Kate that her daughter is alive, and shows as proof a recent photograph of her living in the household of another Commander. However, Kate is told she can never see her daughter. The Commander also tries to get closer to Kate, in the sense that he feels if she enjoyed herself more she would become a better handmaid. The Commander knows Kate's background as a librarian. He gets her hard-to-obtain items and allows her access to his private library. However, during a night out, the Commander has sex with Kate in an unauthorized manner. The other man selected by Serena Joy turns out to be Nick, the Commander's sympathetic chauffeur. Kate grows attached to Nick and eventually becomes pregnant with his child. Kate ultimately kills the Commander, and a police unit then arrives to take her away. She thinks that the policemen are members of the Eyes, the government's secret police. However, it turns out that they are soldiers from the resistance movement (Mayday), of which Nick, too, is a part. Kate then flees with them, parting from Nick in an emotional scene. Kate, is now free once again and wearing non-uniform clothes, but facing an uncertain future. She is living by herself, pregnant in a trailer while receiving intelligence reports from the rebels. She wonders if she will be reunited with Nick, but expresses hope that will happen, and resolves with the rebels' help she will find her daughter.