Monthly Archives: May 2015

  • A Royal Affair

    Old YorkerFilm review

     En kongelig affære

    Nikolaj Arcel (2012)

    There was a point, about thirty minutes in, at which I thought A Royal Affair was set to become a fascinating film.  Johann Struensee, a provincial doctor in Germany and a freethinker, has been appointed the personal physician of the mentally unstable king of Denmark, Christian VII (1749-1808).  Struensee has won Christian’s trust through his ability to swap quotes from Shakespeare plays at his job interview with the monarch and subsequently by indulging his master’s eccentricities.  Those eccentricities include:  addressing his young wife Caroline Mathilde, an English princess who left her family in Britain to marry Christian, as ‘mother’ (Christian’s own mother is dead but he has a balefully controlling stepmother); lavishing much more attention on his hound Gourmand than on Caroline or any other member of his court or family; and giggling irrelevantly.  When Struensee joins the Danish court Caroline is initially suspicious and, given Christian’s affinity with the doctor, a little envious.  But she’s attracted to Struensee both physically and, once she’s seen his library, intellectually.  (Caroline has good reason to covet the library, which includes the works of Rousseau and Voltaire:  many of her own books are confiscated by the Danish censor on her arrival in the country.)  Struensee teaches her to ride a horse – properly mounted rather than sidesaddle – and Caroline is exhilarated.  The sexual undertow of the experience is unmissable but the couple, as they and their mounts return from their exertions at a sedate trot, talk about philosophy.  You wonder just how the themes of forbidden sexual and intellectual liaison between Caroline and Struensee are going to develop, and how Christian, increasingly dependent on Struensee, will react to this dual betrayal.

    The answer is conventionally and – because hopes were raised of something more original – disappointingly.  A Royal Affair is well made and acted; the storytelling is clear and the story being told is involving.  Yet it turns into a familiar historical melodrama and something of an illustrated history lesson:  the closing legends on the screen confirm Johann Struensee’s liberalising legacy to Denmark.  He wields extraordinary power; his influence over the infantile king is such that the doctor comes close to ruling the country, and thereby thwarting the repressive agendas of the political and religious establishments of the day.  Struensee promotes freedom of thought and freedom of speech:  it’s thanks to him that censorship is abolished (although it then has to be reinstated to protect his own interests).   Mads Mikkelsen is excellent as Struensee for as long as the doctor is insinuating himself and, in doing so, keeping much of himself hidden from view – as Caroline, intrigued but frustrated, points out in a snatched conversation with him at the margins of a masked ball.  Mikkelsen isn’t quite so persuasive once Struensee takes centre stage.  He doesn’t suggest a mania for reform:  this aspect of Struensee is further diminished because the director Nikolaj Arcel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Rasmus Heisterberg, tends to focus more on the love affair between Struensee and Caroline than on their political partnership.  Alicia Vikander is impressive as Caroline:  this remote, usually unsmiling young woman isn’t particularly likeable but Vikander very successfully suggests a personality being formed by experience and which grows more wary as she gains greater understanding.  Mikkel Folsgaard’s cuckoo king seems at first a familar screen interpretation of madness.   As you realise the extent to which Christian, though lacking in self-control, is self-aware, Folsgaard’s characterisation becomes more interesting.  (The king’s love of play acting is thoroughgoing; he loves both to watch theatre and to turn his own life into a performance.)  With Trine Dyrholm as the wicked stepmother, David Dencik as the Danish prime minister, and Harriet Walter in the small part of Caroline’s mother.  The fine photography – which suggests pictures at an exhibition but also the reality of damp, greenish-grey landscapes – is by Rasmus Videbaek.

    13 January 2013

  • A Room for Romeo Brass

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Shane Meadows (1999)

    In Shane Meadows’ films, nobody is negligible.   Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are commonly cited as major influences on Meadows:  that may be true stylistically but what could be called his democratic humanism is more reminiscent of Jonathan Demme.   In A Room for Romeo Brass (Meadows’ third feature), the eponymous Romeo’s father Joe – estranged from his wife Carol – seems a vicious nonentity, until we see what he means to his daughter Ladine, how her feelings make Joe ashamed of himself and, especially, when he surprises us by saving the day for pretty well all concerned.   Morell, the twenty-five year old philosopher-misfit who makes friends with the adolescents Romeo and his pal Gavin, is weirdly charming.  He turns out to be something ‘dark’ (to – nearly – use his own word) and hurtful yet this somehow doesn’t diminish him as a person, let alone as a dramatic and comic character.  This description of the splendeurs et misères of life on a working-class housing estate in the East Midlands is sometimes upsetting and occasionally frightening but more often funny and always beautifully, easily observed.   Meadows co-wrote the screenplay with his friend Paul Fraser (who also wrote Twenty Four Seven and Somers Town and provided additional material for Dead Man’s Shoes).  The comedy in A Room for Romeo Brass is very naturally eccentric.   It hardly ever feels forced.

    In his feature film debut, Paddy Considine is spectacularly brilliant and inventive as Morell:  he makes the source of this disturbed young man’s socially clueless charisma as hard to pin down as it’s impossible to deny – the charisma is an extension as well as a concealment of Morell’s unhappiness.  As Romeo, Andrew Shim (who went on to play Milky in This is England) is wonderfully acerbic and vulnerable, and Ben Marshall, as the invalid Gavin, is a great laugher.  (You really miss that laughter when Gavin is confined to bed after an operation on his back – this illness is based on something in Paul Fraser’s own childhood.)  What’s remarkable about Meadows’ direction of actors here is how unified he manages to make a cast that was so disparate in terms of background and celebrity at the time the picture was made.  It’s greatly to the credit of Bob Hoskins – in the small role of one of Gavin’s teachers – that he blends in so easily with relative unknowns (but, then, Hoskins had starred in Meadows’ previous feature Twenty Four Seven).  In 1999, Julia Ford, one of the most underrated British screen actresses of her generation, was perhaps the next most established name after Hoskins.   She gives a typically nuanced performance as Gavin’s mother.   James Higgins, as her husband Bill, is more superficial and broadly comic, although he’s affecting in the sequence when Morell is threatening Bill.   As Ladine, Vicky McClure is especially good in responding to Morell’s desperate courtship of her.  Romeo’s parents Joe and Carol are well played by Frank Harper and Ladene Hall.   There’s an exciting, eclectic soundtrack of songs by, among others, Hank Williams, Fairport Convention, Donovan, Stone Roses and Billy Bragg.

    14 June 2010

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