'Spencer', Lady Di and the end of the monarchy

"The princess," said the poet, "she is pale in her golden chair." And more: "The keyboard of the sound key is mute." And one more: "and in a glass, f

'Spencer', Lady Di and the end of the monarchy

"The princess," said the poet, "she is pale in her golden chair." And more: "The keyboard of the sound key is mute." And one more: "and in a glass, forgotten, a flower faints." Who was going to imagine that the first sextest of the most famous poem written by Rubén Darío in 1895 would summarize such a film of more than a century later. 'Spencer', Pablo Larraín, it tries precisely that: of the poetry that abandon the unnecessary luxuries and the monarchies that are resisting to abandon that exuberance so expensive. Of course, the anapsectic musical rhythm in Alexandrians of the poem is now replaced by a syncopated address in which it matters first of all the fracture, tension, drama.

To place ourselves, and to put land from through with the series 'The Crown', the film stops in just three days of the never-sufficiently crying (or yes) Diana Frances Spencer 'Aka' Lady Di. There is what happened at that decisive end-of-year end at Windsor's house located on the farm of Sandringham in Norfolk where everything broke. The film rather than speculating with nothing is entertaining in rebuilding the internal geography of a cataclysm.

The Chilean director will safely follow the pattern that already used to measure the tragedy of another great lady in her work of 2016 'Jackie' (by the widow of Kennedy). If then the stage was the White House during the four days that followed the magnicide 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 as a family . If before, the protagonist embodied by Natalie Portman suffered in loneliness tortured by the eccentricity of the still hot blood on the jacket costume, now it is Kristen Stewart that broke harassed by the label, the story, the husband, the queen, the servants , dogs, pheasants and everything else. Be that as it may, in one and the other the relevant is the lady in drama.

In both cases, what matters is fiction from private privacy. It is not about narrating or explaining anything but about approaching emotional account from within. On a script of the very taught Steven Knight, the film reconstructs a universe of anguish in which the imperative of duty stumbles upon the most elementary impulse of life. That or, from another point of view, the real patriarchy (of reality and royalty) is given with the evidence of abuse.

In favor of Larraín it is easy to give with the energetic force of a proposal launched to the limit from the first moment. The film literally navigates by the face of a Stewart that, although at times it falls into the temptation of imitation something rough, she maintains the kind of her always on the edge of all the precipices. At times, 'Spencer' risks to confuse the inside with the outside becoming a psychological portrait that is also a terror story. On the wire, each plane seeks the tension without giving up to break in front of the viewer's gaze.

However, and largely because of a libretto that renounces any love of originality from the first minute, the problems also exist. Beyond the metaphors, something more than tremendous (the corpse of a pheasant shaped by the wheels of the military vehicles) or the Symicaliptic parallelisms (Lady Di is, suddenly, Ana Bolena), a good part of the tape is drowning in his reiteration , in its inability to propose something more than once and again identical tragedy.

Of course, it seems impossible not to be placed next to the protagonist for before suffering with it (which also) irritated with those around it. Even if it is not a thesis movie and much less with a single message to not a single one of its sequences, what remains is a painting of the monarchy (of all of them) so fade in its clarity as a demolishing 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 Hipsipila who left the chrysalis!" That is, flee is the only option. And so.

Date Of Update: 04 September 2021, 14:08