Translated material
In August ninety-seven
"The Queen" by Stephen Frears on Moscow screens
After a long reign of conservatives in Britain, Labor, led by Tony Blair, is winning. The film begins with the scene when this vital young man and his wife - an assertive, purposeful woman of anti-monarchical views - visit Buckingham Palace for the first time. According to British tradition, winning an election is not enough - in order to form a government, an order from the Queen is needed.The coming to power of socially alien people was not the only problem that faced Elizabeth II in 1997. Princess Diana dies in August. The seven days that passed between the disaster in the tunnel in the west of Paris and the funeral of the Princess of Wales, the week during which the British monarchy experienced one of its most severe crises, is the segment of the era around which the plot of “The Queen” is built.
Diana is not among the characters in the film, only in the newsreel and in paparazzi photographs: on a yacht with Dodi, in a hotel on the Champs Elysees, in front of the cameras with a black girl in her arms, in front of the BBC presenter - uttering her famous words that she will never become the queen of England, but she would like to be the queen of people's hearts. Prince Charles's mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, is also missing. It will flash only once - in the photograph. Boy princes will appear in the most general plan.
The rest of the characters are played by actors, and at first glance it seems that it is the acting that is the main trump card and the main advantage of the film. The game is truly outstanding. One of the best British actresses, Helen Mirren, was awarded a Golden Globe, an Oscar (both awards in competition with Meryl Streep) and a couple of dozen other prizes for her role as Elizabeth II. (By the way, various Frears films were nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress six times.)
Michael Sheen as Tony Blair is complimentary and accurate to his character at the same time. He plays not so much the real prime minister of Great Britain, who in the ten years since 1997 has managed to become a far from unambiguous figure for the country, but rather the voter’s ideal dream of youth, liveliness, quick and humane reaction against the backdrop of the bristling British stiffness. Prince Philip, performed by James Cromwell, is exactly the Prince Philip that anyone would imagine when thinking about the wife of Elizabeth II. The tone in which the late queen-grandmother (Sylvia Sims) pronounces the word celebrities (we are talking about the guests present at the funeral of Princess Diana) must be heard - unfortunately, losses during dubbing are inevitable... Countless servants, secretaries, palace staff and the assistants at 10 Downing Street all illustrate the point that there are no small roles, especially for English school actors.
The film should be especially enjoyable for those who are curious about tradition and who appreciate precision in detail. We learn about how the Blairs have breakfast: in the kitchen, in a highly democratic setting - husband, wife, three children, no servants - this is how millions of intelligent citizens around the world start the day. We will also see tea parties at Buckingham Palace; We will find out in what form members of the august family can and in what form they cannot appear before outsiders. The queen, awakened at night by terrible news, has the right to walk through the rooms in a dressing gown with a hot water bottle in her hands, but under no circumstances to put on trousers during a hunt...
Frears's hunting scenes are the pinnacle of directorial skill that very few of this year's Oscar nominees managed to reach. Actually, there is no hunting - there is a grandiose panorama of the Scottish mountains, little people hidden somewhere in the crevices (Prince Philip, Charles, boy princes, servants), and in the distance a royal deer, a species not seen for a long time even in these lands, which people are being pursued. The queen does not participate in this baiting, and when the deer comes very close to her, and the shots of hunters are heard nearby, she drives him away from danger. But it delays his death by only a couple of days. A deer wanders into a neighbor's estate, where he is shot by a paying guest - an investment bank manager.
The entire hunting saga is filmed in such an outstanding way that even the transformation of a deer into a symbol of a high culture perishing from the invasion of barbarians does not vulgarize the picture, as often happens with symbols. A royal stag and an investment bank employee are truly incompatible in the same space.
And Frears is not filming historical chronicles at all; his film is the story of the great confrontation between tradition and pop culture, the cult of restraint, inner dignity and the principle “everything is for sale.”
“We live in the era of Ksenia Sobchak,” St. Petersburg composer Leonid Desyatnikov once remarked. Elizabeth II had the fate of living in the era of Diana, Elton John, Armani and other celebrities. Elizabeth and Diana are like a deer and a bank manager: not enemies, but creatures from different worlds. Society's sympathies are on the side of the princess. The director's sympathies unconditionally belong to the Queen, although, of course, not always to the court. It is Blair's attitude towards Elizabeth, which has evolved from irony to admiration, that for Frears and his viewers becomes the most valuable quality of the British prime minister.
Under pressure from Blair, Elizabeth does what most of the population expects of her and what she thought would undermine the foundations - she gives Diana's funeral a state funeral and returns to London from her Scottish estate to honor the memory of her former daughter-in-law, who broke her marriage vows. The monarchy did not collapse. The bewilderment of Elizabeth, the director and the audience at everything that happened remained.
“Queen”, to a much greater extent than the sensational “Babylon,” is a picture about a terrible crisis of communications. And unlike the crisis of the British monarchy, this crisis seems truly insurmountable.