After a quiet period during the Summer, at least in terms of our film club, we started our new season with A Royal Night Out - we hoped it would be a crown-puller, but we only managed a small audience although they were pretty thirty and bar takings were good.
In advance of the film I wondered if it was going to be a sequel to The King's Speech or a prequel to The Queen. In the event it was neither, and although it was enjoyable with some good performances it was less real than the whole of the Harry Potter saga.
Here are my notes:
In advance of the film I wondered if it was going to be a sequel to The King's Speech or a prequel to The Queen. In the event it was neither, and although it was enjoyable with some good performances it was less real than the whole of the Harry Potter saga.
Here are my notes:
A
Royal Night Out
UK 2014 127
minutes
Director: Julian
Jarrold
Starring: Bel Powley, Sarah Gadon,
Emily Watson and Rupert Everett
“…the Windsors are given a sitcom-style veneer
of just-like-us approachability in A Royal Night Out – a
largely fictional romp that plays as a slab of official palace history as
rewritten by Enid Blyton. That may sound ghastly, yet Julian Jarrold’s film has
cheerily naff charm in spades. Following the young princesses Elizabeth and
Margaret as they shed their regal cocoon, joining the great unwashed for the VE
Day celebrations, it’s speculative history jauntily dressed as a cut-glass
entry in the one-wild-night teen subgenre.”
Guy Lodge
In a broadcast speech
to commemorate VE Day on 8 May 1945 Churchill said “We may allow ourselves a
brief period of rejoicing”: in London there were three days of uproarious
celebration and in Buckingham Palace George VI (Rupert Everett) and Queen
Elizabeth (Emily Watson) reluctantly agree that Princesses Elizabeth (Sarah
Gadon) and Margaret (Bel Powley) might be allowed to have a night out on the
town in the company of carefully selected chaperones.
The initial premise of
the film is correct, but the development of the plot is entirely fictional: in
1945 Princess Margaret was only fourteen, the princesses went out in a group of
16 that included military protection, and rather than attending a party at the
Ritz the princesses were allowed only to mingle with the crowds that filled the
roads around Buckingham Palace.
Justin Jarrold began his
career on TV where he directed an episode of Coronation Street before moving on to directing episodes of Cracker and Silent Witness. After
directing several TV films he made his cinema debut with Kinky Boots (2005), following this with Becoming Jane (2007) and Brideshead
Revisited (2008). His most recent TV
work has included Appropriate Adult (2011), a dramatization of the
life of Fred and Rosemary West, The Girl
(2012), about Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren while he was making The Birds,
and the mini-series The Great Train
Robbery (2013). He is currently
working on The Crown, a TV series
about the royal family.
