The Dark Matter of Love BBC 4 10pm

Produced, written and directed by Sarah McCarthy, love is all around her and so the feeling go-oh-ohs. Sorry, I was thinking of that Wet Wet Wet hit that was a number  one hit forever. This is a documentary and not a song. Though there are bits of science, like currants in a bun thrown in to spice things up, in the guise of a professor of psychology and relationship advisors talking about childhood bonding experiences. The narrative is quite simple and I missed the first few minutes, so I’m not sure how it happened, but an American couple from Wisconsin,  Claudio  and Cheryl Diaz decide to adopt a child.  They go abroad to a Russian orphanage in Arkhanelsk and come back not with one kid, but three.  I’m not sure why they  didn’t go for home grown sprouts, because at least they’d speak the language of Yanky-Doodle –and I kid you not—Claudio telling the translator to tell the kids he likened himself to the cartoon character ‘Goofy’and Cheryl as ‘Tinkerbell’, but they are relentlessly nice in an American as apple-pie way. Watching them smile so much wore me out. Onscreen, Marcel and Vadim the pair of five-year-old twins are shown entering there new Mom and Dad’s bedroom and they exclaim (subtitles) that it’s the biggest bed they’ve ever seen. Cheryl is an American sized woman The house is big and bright as Disneyland. Another shot shows one twin asking another, after a piece of mischief (subtitles), whether they’ll get sent back. But the focus was mainly on their enigmatic eleven-year-old sister Masha. One of the reasons for this is that Goofy and Tinkerbell already have a perfectly normal teenage girl Cami. In any drama there’s got to be conflict. The twins are young enough to adapt to the land of the free. In quasi-scientific terms, their brains are sufficiently malleable to adjust to moving from a low-stimulation orphanage, to a high stimulation enviroment, where they don’t speak the language. These institutional deficits are translated into a tendency to prolonged temper tantrums and hyperactivity. Understandably, as we watched them through the seasons of winter and summer...and winter and summer, Tinkerbell lost much of her shine and looked plain frazzled and Goofy looked glummer and glummer. Masha’s Mona Liza smile never faltered for the camera. Perhaps the best explanation for this came from a documentary that was on last night. In an orphanage showing feelings is regarded as a sign of weakness, so the cuts of day-to-day living becomes internalized. Affective responses become more and more muted. Could the sleeping princess inside Masha be unfrozen?  Well, a year later she’s shown performing, singing, in a school show. She’s got a new best friend. Masha is obviously cracker-box smart. That’s a great help. But love’s a funny thing and nobody survives it unchanged. I hope it’s a true story.