Product: Victoria & Albert: A Royal Love Affair [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 2.0
An Abundance of Inaccuracies
For the past eight years I've been working on a project on the Romanovs. A sizeable part of my research also included their British relations, particularly Queen Victoria and her daughters.This BBC movie as entertaining as it was was probably more damaging for the uninformed than informative. On a superficial level, Queen Victoria was never considered a beauty or even attractive in her own time, even when she was young. Although she did have a narrow waistline. So picking such an attractive actress to portray her was probably as bad as when Catherine Zeta-Jones (one of the leading Hollywood beauties) was picked to portray another monarch, Catherine the great of Russia, who was notorious for her plain looks. Albert, I should admit looked more like the real thing.I can't tell you how vivacious and energetic the real Victoria was, since the actress in the movie was quite lively, but she could have never been so indiscreet in public as to kiss her husband and even show affection publicly. She gave great importance to decorum and would have never screamed in the hallways when others could hear her.In the movie she also appeared to be almost a modern mother who let her children enjoy their lives. Nothing could be further than the truth. She certainly loved her children but she was very tyrannical towards them. At the table her children sat very quietly and minded their own business. She made her daughters' later lives especially miserable. Therefore, they were all much closer to their loving father that to their mother. Also from the very beginning Albert took control of the palace affairs, more or less like our Prince Phillip. It's rather unfortunate that the only scene that showed her at a theatre was attending a comedy play. She did watch comedies, but she had a rather low opinion of them and would not have burst into laughter like that in public. In many ways she was a boring person. And her last sentence in the movie which says that she would move on with life because Albert would have wanted her to, is also rather inaccurate. All of us know, that after his death she withdrew from public and her duties for years, until people finally convinced her that it was doing so much damage to the family's image that she finally gave in. Although she never took off her mourning black dress, wearing it even at her children's weddings. An entire ultra-conservative era was not named after Queen Victoria for no reason, and not just because she lived in that period but that she was the personification of the mentality of the time, somewhat of a U-turn from the 18th century Enlightenment. I think this movie was made to change the popular image of Queen Victoria as a strict, dogmatic and inflexible woman (which is definitely more accurate), though, I admit, she had a kind heart. And perhaps to boost the current queen's image too, who is also believed to be dry and dogmatic. But in her case I think it's rather unfair.