Royal voyeurism

Rating: 9/10 (25 September 2006)

What I found interesting of The Queen is how it manages to exploit the voyeuristic tendencies of a cinema audience without ever transgressing the limits of acceptability, transforming the plot into caricature or a vulgar British farce. It reminded me of the work of photographer artist Alison Jackson who uses celebrities' lookalikes to create images that encourage the viewer to believe they are true, although they constantly play with the idea of collective fantasy. This border between true and untrue is the principle of the attraction of the movie, and the through the keyhole vision of the Royals and Downing Street comes at a time where obsession with fame and celebrity does not in any way escape them. This is a game that Diana knew well to play for her own advantage and won hands down, even after her untimely or, perhaps for some, God sent death.
Stephen Frears clever device of mixing newsreel footage showing real images give credibility to the artificiality of those based in what we assume it might have happened or are just product of his and the scriptwriter Peter Morgan's imagination. Undoubtedly is Helen Mirren the only one that not only carries the weight of the film on her shoulders but blurs, purely through the use of her amazing talent as an actress, all boundaries between what is believable and what is not.
The other aspect of the film that I found interesting and exciting was the suggestion of a dramatic shift of certain British values, a change of character present already since the earlier Thatcher's years and then completed by Blair after wards, that has transformed British society drastically in the last two decades. Although the subject is at the core of the film this could have been dealt with in more depth - what is it that has affected this change and made the British tribe so different to what they once were?
The film seems to present the opposite poles of stiff upper lip unemotional and repressed attitude of the monarch and her entourage to those of the public showing off their emotions and unable to contain them as well as those in government searching for modernization and progress. The corrosive influence that the period of the last two decades or more have had in the fundamental transformation of those presumably permanent cultural and character forming values perhaps is something the film misses by only showing the queen as attached to old traditions and made the way she is as a consequence of her duty and upbringing. At the risk of sounding like defending the monarchy perhaps someone will one day take the challenge of making a film about this loss of values and put a mirror in front of the British population instead of doing so, gently and with a light tone, only to their Gracious Queen.