• Criticism Fellini passes it to Maradona and ... Sorrentino's goal

  • Criticism Jane Campion delivers a huge apology and refutation of the western: 'The power of the dog'

  • Critic Parallel Mothers: Almodóvar gives birth to her most beautiful and political approach to motherhood and memory

  • Criticism Paul Schrader dazzles and overwhelms as a poker player in 'the card counter'

"The princess,"

said the poet,

"is pale in her golden chair

.

"

And more:

"the keyboard of its sound key is mute"

. And one more:

"and in a glass, forgotten, a flower faints

.

"

Who would have imagined that the first sextet of the most famous poem written by Rubén Darío in 1895 would so fully summarize a film from more than a century later. '

Spencer

', Pablo Larraín, deals with precisely that: poetry that abhors unnecessary luxuries and monarchies that refuse to abandon that expensive exuberance. Of course, the anapestic musical rhythm in the Alexandrines of the poem is now replaced by

a syncopated direction in which fracture, tension,the drama.

To place ourselves, and to put land in the middle with the series

'The Crown',

the film stops in just three days of the never enough cried (or yes) Diana Frances Spencer '

aka

' Lady Di. It is recounted what happened on that decisive end of the year spent in the House of Windsor located on his estate at Sandringham in Norfolk where everything fell apart.

The film, rather than speculating on anything, entertains itself in reconstructing the internal geography of a cataclysm.

The Chilean director largely follows the pattern he already used to measure the tragedy of another great lady in his 2016 work '

Jackie

' (for Kennedy's widow). If then the setting was the White House for the four days following the assassination on September 22, 1963 in Dallas, now it is a palace in the middle of the countryside in something like a long weekend of the 90s with the family. . If before, the protagonist played by

Natalie Portman

suffered in solitude tortured by the eccentricity of the blood still hot on the suit jacket, now it is

Kristen Stewart

the one who goes bankrupt harassed by etiquette, history, husband, queen, servants, dogs, pheasants and everything else.

Be that as it may, in both the relevant thing is the lady in drama.

Kristen Stewart, at the Lido.ETTORE FERRARIEFE

In both cases, what matters is the fiction from the intimacy of the private.

It is not about narrating or explaining anything but about approaching the emotional story from within.

Based on a script by the brawny

Steven Knight,

the film reconstructs a universe of anguish in which the imperative of duty meets the most elemental impulse in life.

That or, from another point of view, the royal patriarchy (of reality and royalty)

comes face to face with the evidence of abuse.

In Larraín's favor, it is easy to find the energetic forcefulness of a proposal launched to the limit from the first moment.

The film literally navigates the face of a Stewart who, although at times falls into the temptation of a somewhat crude imitation, keeps the guy always on the edge of all precipices.

At times, '

Spencer

' risks confusing the inside with the outside,

turning into a psychological portrait that is also a horror story.

On the wire, each shot seeks tension without giving up breaking in front of the viewer's gaze.

Still from 'Spencer'.

However, and largely because of a script that renounces any hint of originality from the first minute. Beyond the metaphors something more than tremendous (the corpse of a pheasant shaken by the wheels of military vehicles) or the psychical parallels (Lady Di is, suddenly, Ana Bolena), the

whole film drowns in its reiteration, in his inability to propose anything more than over and over the same tragedy.

Of course, it seems impossible not to stand next to the protagonist, rather than suffer with her (which also) get irritated with those around her.

Although it is not a thesis film, much less with a message attached to not one of its sequences, what remains is a painting of the monarchy (of all of them) as dire in its clarity as it is devastating

in the exhibition of something as basic as the pain, the imposture and the affront.

As the poet would say in his 'Sonatina',

"Oh, who was a hypsipile who left the chrysalis!"

.

That is, running away is the only option.

And so.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • cinema

  • culture

  • Elizabeth II of England

  • Prince Charles of England

  • United Kingdom

  • history

InternationalWilliam Dalrymple: "It would not come as a surprise to me if Afghanistan disintegrated"

CinePedro Almodóvar: "What Rajoy said about historical memory was the height of clumsiness and a superlative insult"

Venice Film Festival Fellini passes it to Maradona and ... Sorrentino's goal

See links of interest

  • Last News

  • Holidays 2021

  • Home THE WORLD TODAY

  • Sweden - Spain, live

  • Stage 19, live: Tapia - Monforte de Lemos