The Young Victoria

We watched a movie I've wanted to watch for a few years but missed until this evening: The Young Victoria, directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, starring Emily Blunt as the Queen and Rupert Friend as Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.  They were both excellent at the top of a pretty impressive cast all round (even allowing for the slightly paradoxical fact that the then 26 year Ms Blunt plays the 18 year old Princess Victoria of Kent who becomes Monarch alongside 36 year old Paul Bettany playing the 59 year old Lord Melbourne.  Go figure ... but I nitpick)

The impeccable Jim Broadbent

I'm no great fan of Royalty nor of chocolate box - not to say soap opera - reinventions of history ... and yet.  I quite enjoyed this superior farrago of an ahistorical fiction.  The palace gardens, interiors and facades looked sumptuous, elegant and imposing although not, I think, Buck House.  The frocks were lovely.  The gentlemen's suits looked appropriately rigid and the uniforms quite dashing.  And the acting was engaging which allowed the willing (and necessary) suspension of disbelief in a script that was entirely what you would expect from the man who has given us Gosford Park (which I liked very much despite its established-order predilections) as well as Downton Abbey (which I've never seen) and would go on to be 'elevated' (I believe they say) to the position of Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, a Tory Life Peer (quelle surprise).

One is required to take the ways the script is - at best - 'economical with the actualite' with a pinch or two of salt.  Did Victoria and Albert really discuss the game of thrones that was 19th Century Europe over a symbolically breathless game of chess (not unlike but more restrained than Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the original of The Thomas Crown Affair)?  And we know, do we not, that Prince Alfred never took a bullet for his Royal Mrs at any time (let alone in the manner of Kevin Costner protecting Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard - a connection neatly made in the Guardian's deconstruction of the Fellowes' screenplay here)?

But what can I say about this film, of which one should not expect too much given Sarah, Duchess of York is credited as a producer?  (On the other hand, so too is Martin Scorsese, who has no need to prove his cinema street-cred to anyone; least of all me).  The truth is, I think, it's a well-constructed fairy tale in the revisionist, centrist, patriarchal mainstream manner.  Not history but ideal telly for a wet bank holiday evening. Despite myself - despite my prejudices perhaps - I enjoyed it.