Leaving in the starch
The Age
Saturday August 22, 2009
A French-Canadian director sticks to Victorian values in telling the story of an English queen remembered for her sourness, writes Stephanie Bunbury. JULIAN Fellowes speaks in an orotund bellow of lordly English that would immediately halt any poacher trying to slip away with an illicit hare. His comic timing is perfect. Fellowes, who won an Oscar for writing Gosford Park and is now pretty much your go-to guy for anything to do with movies and the English upper classes, is probably the only person on earth who could make the political ambitions of a 19th-century German duke seem rivetingly entertaining.He is explaining how Prince Albert's marriage to Queen Victoria was part of a broader political scheme by the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg to gain a foothold in every reigning family in Europe in the early 19th century. "There was definitely a plot!" he hoots. "It's the most extraordinary story! At this funny little ducal house, which was kind of totally unimportant, there was this scheme to build the family up!"We follow various younger sons to Portugal, Austria and London, where one Prince Leopold married Princess Charlotte of Wales and, when she died young, took the job of being king of the Belgians instead; we are all duly riveted and much entertained.Fellowes knows a good deal about Albert of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha since writing The Young Victoria, in which the sumptuous Emily Blunt plays Victoria as she was at the age of 17, when her second cousin Albert was first sent to court her. Albert is portrayed by heart-throb Rupert Friend; Paul Bettany is the debonair prime minister, Lord Melbourne.The director is Jean-Marc Vallee, a French-Canadian whose last film was an eccentrically twisted offering about five brothers battling to grow up under a paterfamilias obsessed with Patsy Cline. Hardly anyone saw CRAZY, but it was quite unlike anything else. Between Vallee and those actors, it's quite a hip ensemble for what is ostensibly a big-frock film.To me, that sends a worrying signal. There is a tendency, when talking about period dramas, for those involved to emphasise how modern their characters really are, how universal their stories, how immediately accessible their situations. Emily Blunt is asked whether she thinks Victoria, whom most people remember as a sour-faced matriarch who didn't believe in lesbians, was actually a very modern woman. She duly confirms that she was. "I think she wanted to assume her position in the way she wanted, and that was partly defiance and partly because she was forward-thinking."Jean-Marc Vallee echoes her view by comparing the princess' instant fame as queen-in-waiting to that of a rock star. "I wanted to see her that way, as early British rock'n'roll, which is to make some noise and tell the authorities in power, 'F--- it, I want to do it my way,' " he says. "And she became queen, and that's what she did."You can see why they insist on these anachronisms: nobody wants to make their film sound stuffy and stiff, like a cinematic version of a Chesterfield sofa, when it is about subjects that are vital and interesting. The Young Victoria certainly is.On the one hand, there is the attempt at an arranged marriage between Victoria and Albert that, against all odds, developed into a famously passionate union. But their reign marked the beginnings of a true constitutional monarchy, the system that consolidated Britain as the most powerful country on earth while other parts of Europe were racked by revolutions.Perhaps the most remarkable part of Victoria's story is the bit hardly anyone knows: her childhood before she became queen. As depicted by Fellowes, it added up to a privileged version of sustained abuse. Young Victoria was not allowed friends. Kept away from court by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, who was also a Saxe-Coburg, and her masterful personal secretary, John Conroy, she was controlled to the point where she could never be alone. She was obliged to sleep with her mother. She could not so much as take the stairs without the guiding hand of a lady-in-waiting. Her mother was entirely subject to Conroy, who bullied and manhandled the girl he saw as his future ticket to wealth and power.These are all strong stories. It should not be presumed that they will have been parlayed into heritage confectionery, even if that is what usually happens. So getting someone like Vallee to direct the film was "a smart move", says Friend, because he has zero investment in the sentiment surrounding British historical pageantry. "We all have a perception of what we think a typical English period drama might be, you know, whether it's bonnets or breeches," he says. "Jean-Marc has none of that history in him, so he's looking at it just as two people who fall in love: a very modern, fresh idea. And he has a very contemporary approach to storytelling. It's not €“ much as I love them €“ Merchant Ivory."MERCHANT Ivory films such as Room with a View are, supposedly, the benchmark of the big-frock film, largely driven by a romantic view of the past devoid of the grit, rub and depravity of reality. Also supposedly, nobody wants to be seen to be in their camp. But Fellowes, for one, is refreshingly chary of trying to modernise stories that belong to another era that had its own values, taboos and priorities that may now be not just unfamiliar, but incomprehensible. These people are not modern. Their stories are not universal. They are very particularly of their time, which is €“ by contrast with that conventional publicists' wisdom €” what makes them alive."I'm not a believer in modernising," he says. "If you modernise too much, the actual quandary the characters are in ceases to exist. You have to have a fairly clear idea of the disciplines of that particular world to understand when they were in a spot, you know. The problem, if you make it too modern, is that you'll just think, 'Well, don't hold that hand as you go downstairs! Refuse!' But that wasn't the world they were in. And I think you have to show enough of the true detail of the period to show why they were in this predicament."Clearly, Fellowes is a born fogey; he would have known the correct position for a grapefruit spoon well before he began researching the niceties and details of English court life in 1836. All that reading made him still more of a stickler for detail. He spent much of his time on set, he says with impeccable comic delivery, on his knees before Emily Blunt, begging her to wear her most hated garment: gloves. A few anachronisms crept into dialogue when actors were simply expected to maintain background chit-chat of their own devising. "I was a little worried," Fellowes says, eyebrows arched in mock shock, "when King William IV told the Duke of Wellington to 'enjoy the meal'."But there wasn't much to worry about, in fact, because Jean-Marc Vallee turned out to be just as determined to get it right. An unknown import, who shot on location in 14 stately British homes where he was no more than a tourist, and keenly aware that his own slightly uncertain English made him a poor judge of anyone else's accent or period idiom, he was permanently uncomfortable. By way of compensation, Vallee surrounded himself with experts €“ dialect coaches, an authority on royal protocol, people who knew how to hold a wine glass €” to ensure total accuracy. Nobody was going to catch him out. "I have to study and therefore read a lot of books," he says. "I like to think I became as British as the British, if not more so. I don't think I hit a wrong note."Whatever Friend says of Vallee's fast, modern style of shooting, he says he resisted most temptations to move the camera, letting the drama unfold before it."I tried to stay very humble and let the story be accurate and upfront."What he and Fellowes shared from the outset was awe at Victoria's resilience. Anyone else, they reason, would have emerged from that childhood cowed, crushed and emotionally dysfunctional. Victoria's first act when news arrived that she was now queen was to cast her mother from her bedroom. "She should have been completely flattened, and she wasn't," says Fellowes. "This is an unmarried girl of 18 in 1837, where did that strength and self-belief come from?" Even as a child, points out Vallee, she swore that if the job fell to her, she would do it well. "A young woman who becomes the boss of the most important nation in the world: how do you deal with this?" he ponders. "You have to feel you're special, because you are special."WHEN he looks at the film now, Vallee says, it seems like a fairytale. If he brought any cultural contribution of his own, he thinks, it was probably his emphasis on the extraordinary passion that kept Victoria in thrall to the memory of her husband after his death for twice as long as they were married.It all looks so beautiful, too, that he can hardly believe it is a film he made. Probably nobody who has seen his earlier work will believe it either."I am curious to see how people at home respond," he says. "My people will hate it. But I don't feel like an impostor, I feel good about it. I tried so hard to become what I am, not in order to make this film and to be accepted." Rather as Prince Albert did, I suggest. He agrees. His immersion in their world was complete.Laudable as this is, however, there is one quite wildly modern twist that Vallee was not allowed to bring to The Young Victoria that strikes me as a loss. Throughout the shoot, he says, he set the mood on set by playing the melancholic ambient rock of Icelandic group Sigur Ros. Sigur Ros then wrote a score for the film, but it didn't do well in test screenings with distributors."So, given there is a lot of money involved, we went for a more traditional choice," he says. It is now a different film. "The composer kept a similar feeling, but sometimes it feels very Hollywood, too much punctuated. It wasn't my choice, but I had to learn to live with it, which is the Hollywood way."Vallee says he doesn't resent the loss, but I do. The casual misplacement of spoons or accents is a sloppy anachronism; the sort of deliberate updating of mores that would send Victoria to bed with Albert on the first date is simply dishonest. But Sigur Ros emoting through the canyons of 19th-century regal politics: that isn't a lie. That's a provocation. The other kind of modernity, the sort Julian Fellowes cannot bear, is all about sugar-coating the past to make it palatable. But rejecting the Sigur Ros music isn't an embarrassment averted. That's a chance missed.The Young Victoria opens on August 27.
© 2009 The Age
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