Stuart Wolfendale

They can only ever get me into the Broadway at IFC 2. It’s not just the business class seating or the intimate theatres. It is the ticket prices and the blood-lettingly expensive glass and gloss retail outlets above and around it which do much to ensure that the riff-raff and under 16s won’t be in there with me. I am not an egalitarian when it comes to going to the cinema. I see no social merit in being in a darkened space trying to view a film with people who cannot sit still or keep their gobs shut either from speaking or scoffing sweets.The last time I relented and was taken elsewhere was to the Silvercord cinema in Haiphong Road. Even the address suggests peanut husks and flying mucus. The film starred Nicholas Tse, one of the three heroes who won through against demon kung fu because of the power of their hair-dos. We sat three rows from the screen and it was like being on a reformatory school bus outing in a blackout. I will swear my head was walked over.So, it was a rare treat indeed to have the IFC screen two films up to now in 2007 that I wanted to see and could get somebody to go with me to. The first was the German movie “The Lives of Others” which won the foreign film Oscar and which had me leaving the cinema in a mildly elated silence and the certainty that it was the best thing that had happened to me all week. The other one, not very surprisingly given that I am British, conservatively liberal, liberal with my conservatism and a romantic, was “The Queen”.At the end of this one, I drifted outside with a weak smile on my face and ‘Yes, it was alright, fine, jolly good.” on my lips as though I was  commenting on a show jumping round by Princess Anne where she’d walloped a couple of poles. As film criticism that isn’t up to much but it was a register of faint disappointment.Someone wrote somewhere that it was a good ‘made for TV’ movie which implies there can be such a result so it did manage to rise above that and then lodged itself, slightly, somewhere under a full blooded feature.It will be rightly remembered as a tour de force in suave cameo from Helen Mirren who had the Queen down to the country-gel gait. Martin Sheen’s Tony Blair was the awfully decent, faintly dishy schoolboy ‘head of house’ that Blair himself has always gone for as varnish. The rest were caricatures from which the soap suds were beginning to rise. Prince Charles played and looked more like Edward VIII. Sylvia Syms’ Queen Mother had a few amusing lines and an awful lot to drink and , talking of which, I regret that the late Princess Margaret was not included.The portrayal of Prince Philip was stupid because irascible, reactionary,and undiplomatic though the prince maybe , stupid he isn’t and , apart from an accuracy in catching the rasp in the voice, stupid was all you got from James Cromwell.What I could not understand was an omission made from either ignorance or idleness. Throughout, Robin Janvrin was portrayed as the Queen’s private secretary. At that time he was only her deputy private secretary. Though he was on duty at Balmoral on the night of Diana’s death, the principal private secretary was Sir Robert Fellowes who happened to be on holiday on his own estate, not far away.Fellowes was the grand vizier amongst the courtiers who were so puzzling Blair. He had been in the Queen’s private office for twenty years. He was a major player in this drama. He was even Diana’s brother-in-law and had a furious row with Prince Charles over the manner of his retrieval of her body from Paris. Perhaps featuring him in the movie would have been too sharp and pointy for such a benign and gentle vehicle because Fellowes was a chilly, cut glass, Machiavellian operator in defence of his sovereign. His absence robbed the picture of serious documentary status from about twenty minutes in.For a last quibble, I turn to its economy of scale. The return of Diana’s ‘body’ to a small cheap to rent aerodrome with weeds growing out of the tarmac, the excessive use   of contemporary TV footage and the apparent employment of the tea lady to write the script in places sapped confidence. In particular, pretending to be where you are not has to be done artfully and the lack of that in the final frames seriously weakened my smile on the way out.Buckingham Palace garden does not have an eighteenth century formality in layout. There is no baroque fountain in the middle of it. So when the Queen and Tony Blair drift out of the frame (to Marble Arch?) and you are left with it for the credits, you begin to wonder where you are and where you’ve been. 

 

Posted in All, Performance