Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Woman (spoilers)

Rating: 8/10 (2 April 2001)

Like Sirk's Nazi-era 'Final Accord', 'Elizabeth' ends with a familiar image from totalitarian propagandist iconography - in this case, the Virgin Queen, divinely majestic and aloof from her subjects - having previously revealed the processes that have led to this image's construction. The gulf between serene image and brutal reality, between Elizabeth's powdered ascetisism and the cynical bloodletting, is all the more grotesque in its distasteful sublimation as religious metamorphosis - as Catholic England becomes Protestant, so Elizabeth replaces the Virgin Mary, like Madonna in 'Like a Virgin' re-chastening herself, in a paradoxically Catholic ritual of renunciation, mortification and abstinence - when she has her hair lopped off, like a young woman entering a nunnery, the fallen locks on her thighs suggest that it is more than hair she is losing. This sequence completes a dialectic (which very much concerned Elizabethan England) in the film between the human body and the body politic Elizabeth is a symbol of.
This is a historical epic you think Foucault might have approved of - indeed, 'Surveiller et Punir' wouldn't be a bad subtitle. There is a Foucauldian cynicism about the machinations of State here, where religious ideals are only so much murderous politicking (the scenes with the Pope and his envoy are frighteningly convincing), where a church is seen as a perfect setting for regicide.
Kapur impresses on us the monumentality of the world against which Elizabeth struggles, male power figured in forbidding stone buildings and huge, shadowy chambers, where human activity is obscured by the decor or veils, framed by crucifix crosses that have nothing to do with religious trauma. The film opens with Catholics burning Protestant 'heretics' in front of a mob; and ends with a 'Godfather'-like massacring of Protestant Elizabeth's Catholic enemies, whose threat is not religious, but one of power.

The most repeated visual motif in the film is an unmotivated long shot from deep above a building's rafters looking down on the dotted political players, a terrifying reminder of surveillance and omnipotence, an expression of power that doesn't depend on its human agents, that will always be there to circumscribe human endeavour. Is it the perenially observing Walsingham, Elizabeth's darkly charismatic advisor-cum-secret-police-henchman, given one of the great entrances in modern cinema? Or is it the God so godlessly invoked by these monsters?
Pedants have complained that 'Elizabeth' is historically inaccurate, as if cinema was a medium for plodding out facts. 'Elizabeth' is not a recreation of Elizabethan England and its modes of cultural expression - the film would be more formalised, ritualised, set as a masque rather than just featuring some. Kapur's modern techniques, his psychologising, his narrative pace, his restless camera, his (often over-egged) visual effects, all capture the instability of a period that tried to cover it up with pomp and ceremony.

This does not mean that the historical colour - the music, the pantomimes, the boat rides, the dances aren't in themselves delightful; it's just that they're imbued with narrative and character value (19th and 20th century values) rather than symbolic ones. This can be seen in the anachronistic use of Elgar and Mozart towards the end, the latter's Requiem especially, as Elizabeth becomes the Virgin Queen, in effect killing herself as a woman.

In the most bizarrely eclectic cast ever assembled in movies, mixing comedians, footballers, TV quiz-show hosts with 'proper' actors, Vincent Cassel is hilarious, and Geoffrey Rush is outstanding, proving after the false-start of 'Shine' that he is truly one of the most remarkable figures in film.