When directors are very sure of their story and their skills, they run the risk of betraying the end at the beginning of the film.

For example, Billy Wilder had a dead man swim in the pool in “Twilight Boulevard”, which tells from the afterlife how he got there, and began the noir thriller “Woman without a Conscience” with an insurance agent's genre-untypical murder confession.

The Chilean director Pablo Larraín likes to use this technique in his films in the abstract, so with the first images he sets leitmotifs that not only set the tone, but mostly also reveal the results of the stories that are told here.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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In "The Club" a priest and his dog draw endless, narrow circles on the beach, which anticipate the circle of hell into which he will fall due to his offenses, and in "Ema" a young woman watches with relish, like a traffic light Flames go up, only to burn down the traditional ideas of love and family a little later. And so in Larraín's latest film "Spencer" a pheasant lies on a country road while military vehicles skitter over the dead bird to deliver the ingredients for the Christmas dinner to the royal family at Sandringham Castle, and the bird is an omen of the fate of Princess Diana , which the following 116 minutes are about. American actress Kristen Stewart, who embodies Diana with perfect upper-class English,will someday look pityingly after a living pheasant in the castle park and breathe in the slightly pressed voice typical of Diana: "A beautiful but stupid creature." . ”One could not suggest Diana's fatal accident in Paris caused by paparazzi in a more laconic way.

Search for the place as a search for one's own identity

However, “Spencer” contrasts the images that everyone has of the princess with their own, completely new ones. Diana, who races through the English countryside in an open Porsche and angrily studies a map on the steering wheel: “Where the hell am I?”, The search for the place as a search for one's own identity. The rebellion against the rigid rules with which life in the circle of royals is regulated is made clear by Steven Knight's script with precise, concise dialogues; for example when Diana boycotts the preselection of her clothes through the court protocol. She declined a lime green costume for dinner: “It doesn't fit.” When the maid asked whether she had already tried it, she pointedly added: “... to my mood.” It should have been black. Not because of the depression, but,to better bring out the thick pearls that Prince Charles gave her for Christmas, without realizing that it is the same necklace that his beloved is wearing in a paparazzi photo. Diana is by no means a victim here; Under the surface, which is stretched to tear apart, lies a woman who knows her way around the game of small gestures and knows how to use them for her own signals.

“Spencer” is not supposed to be a classic biopic. “It is a fantasy of our culture to think that one could depict a person's life one-to-one in a film,” says director Larraín in an interview with this newspaper. Because he thinks so, he prefixed his film with the statement that it was a “fable based on a true tragedy”. The action takes place on three consecutive Christmas days at Sandringham Castle sometime at the beginning of the nineties (the time in which Diana's decision to divorce and against a life in the circle of the royals was made) Pheasant,which runs through the whole film as a metaphor for the character Diana (therefore the last uprising of the princess against the royal family has to take place during the traditional pheasant hunt). And as far as the moral and socially critical discussion that belongs to this narrative form is concerned, it pervades the film gently, but unmistakably like the wisps of fog that hang over the park around the castle and sometimes turn it into the backdrop of a Gothic horror fairy tale. Larraín follows his main character alone and, through Diana's gaze, astutely dissects concepts such as tradition, monarchy and motherhood.which hang over the park around the castle and sometimes turn it into the backdrop of a Gothic horror fairy tale. Larraín follows his main character alone and, through Diana's gaze, astutely dissects concepts such as tradition, monarchy and motherhood.which hang over the park around the castle and sometimes turn it into the backdrop of a Gothic horror fairy tale. Larraín follows his main character alone and, through Diana's gaze, astutely dissects concepts such as tradition, monarchy and motherhood.