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Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in "Spencer": Last Christmas Days with the Royal Family
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AccomplicesFilm / DCM
There are many ways to commemorate the often unhappy British Princess Diana. Elton John, for example, sang a song after her right after her death in 1997, a Princess Di memorial fountain has been bubbling in London's Hyde Park since 2004, and a statue in the garden of Kensington Palace has been in memory of her since this year. But it was only the Chilean director Pablo Larraín who came up with the idea of wearing one of her dresses for a scarecrow in a British field. "Spencer" is the name of his film in the competition for the Golden Lion at the 78th Venice Film Festival.
In it, the South American fantasizes with a lot of German film funding a Christmas get-together of the already hopelessly quarreled spouses Diana and Charles, a slightly crazy family celebration in the circle of the royals in the British castle Sandringham in 1991. A few months later the court officially announced the separation of the Couple known.
Basically, Larraín is mainly active here as a master of photo re-enactments.
A few years ago, in the film "Jackie: The First Lady", he had actress Natalie Portman recreated iconic images from Jackie Kennedy's life in costumes based on historical models.
Now he's doing something similar by photographing actress Kristen Stewart as a Princess Diana doppelganger.
His film is always completely with himself when he can show Stewart in typical Diana costumes, with Diana looking up, in splendidly frozen tableaus.
"Spencer" shows off the painful images of a beautiful young woman in a stately environment.
The director has to deal with the frost
However, »Spencer« is always badly off the mark and stupidly intrusive when the director somehow wants to let his nicely decorated characters get into action with one another. Then he places the actor Jack Farthing as Prince Charles in a symmetry-addicted rigor at one end of a pool table and his wife, who knocks angrily on the edge of the table, at the other end. The two discuss the question of whether their sons can shoot animals to death for Christmas. “People don't want us to be like them,” says Charles. Of course, a billiard ball will soon fall to the ground. Another time Stewart is seen kneeling in front of the toilet as bulimic Diana and vomiting before she opens the door to her favorite maid played by Sally Hawkins and howls in her arms - preferably about it,that the royals are too stingy to heat, which is why you always have to freeze inside their walls.
Director Larraín has to deal with the frost. His Diana munched on chicken thighs and cakes in the refrigerator at night, at night she strolled across the castle lawn in a light dress, in the dormitory she comforted her sons, who were shivering under thick duvets - and the next day, despite the apparently icy temperatures, she drove through the open convertible with them Winter landscape. "Spencer" is a "fairy tale from a real tragedy," it says in the opening credits. It is clearly about a princess who got lost in the realm of an ice queen (the queen who always smiles demonically) and is plagued by a metaphysical chill.
Kristen Stewart's angry Diana, who is late for every family gathering and only turns to her sons, bears little resemblance to the heartwarming, playful, touchingly disturbed Diana, with whom actress Emma Corrin delighted an audience of millions in the fourth season of the Netflix series "The Crown".
In “The Crown” the audience was informed about the suffering of the Princess of Wales at the side of her husband, who unfortunately was mostly in love with someone else, using the soap - most likely not always historically correct in detail, but with overwhelming success.
In contrast to "The Crown", Larraín's film is not interested in the psychological intricacies of the fights that Princess Diana had to fight out of jealousy, against the rigid protocol and because of her love of glamor.
»Spencer« sees itself as a surreal sculpture in honor of a rebel and goddess of fashion.
Ghosts from the past
In order to put her heroine on the art pedestal, the director Larraín and his screenwriter Steve Knight - he came up with the 1920s gangster series "Peaky Blinders" - forged an enthusiasm for Diana for the historical Queen Anne Boleyn.
Boleyn was beheaded in 1536 because her husband Henry VIII wanted to marry another woman.
In "Spencer" she now haunts, played by the actress Amy Manson, as a ghostly apparition through the hallways and rooms of Sandringham Castle.
She is not the only ghost from the past that hallucinates the apparently psychologically badly damaged Princess Diana.
Flashbacks of happy childhood conjure up Diana's notorious love for her father, the eighth Earl Spencer.
more on the subject
Kristen Stewart as Princess of Wales: The Many Film Lives of DianaBy Oliver Kaever
Netflix series "The Crown": This is what Diana and Charles look like in season five
Unveiled Diana statue: The princess would not be enthusiastic, but touchedBy Ulrike Knöfel
This fatherly love is also the reason why Diana freed a scarecrow from an old raincoat in the film »Spencer«, because the rag once belonged to her father, and replaced it with a yellow costume from her glorious collection.
In order to set this difficult symbolic act in motion, you see her already at the beginning of the film with a wild look, in a tight skirt and high heels, marching through furrows, already here a princess on the crackling pea.
After the screenings in Venice, "Spencer", which was filmed for the most part in German castle locations, including in the Taunus, and received more than four million euros from German funding sources, received brief, friendly applause. A couple of British newspapers celebrate the film for allegedly adding new, unexpected highlights to the myth of the princess. A London tabloid even wishes US actress Kristen Stewart an Oscar for her portrayal of Diana. That doesn't change the fact that the "Spencer" movie is a terribly static, shockingly boring art exercise. She is a »magnet for madness«, says the heroine Diana once in the film. Unfortunately, in "Spencer" she didn’t inspire a director to do interesting madness,but is only denounced as a well-dressed princess psycho wreck.
