Oscarized for this role, the actress embodies Elizabeth II in an ironic chronicle, produced by Stephen Frears, of the week following the death of Lady Di, in 1997.
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The advent of Elizabeth II corresponded to that of television: in 1953, his coronation was one of the first cathodic festivals in the planetary village. And here is the famous cinema, with humor, severity and acuity, the disaster that marked the long reign of the daughter of George VI.
The Queen, by Stephen Frears, meticulously chronicle the week that goes from Sunday August 31 to Saturday September 6, 1997, from the death of Lady Diana Spencer, in Paris, to his funeral, in the basilica of Westminster. Helen Mirren plays the role of the sovereign and her work earned her the Volpi Cup for best actress in Venice, in 2006, and the Oscar in 2007.
opposition with Tony Blair
You have to see the film to take the measure of its richness. She first depends on the intelligence of the scenario of Peter Morgan, who combines the funeral curiosity of contemporary journalists with the psychological solidity of the great victorious novelists. He paid the same attention, both scrupulous and passionate, to his characters. The discreet staging of Stephen Frears uses the sets (the outdoor pump of the Scottish castle of Balmoral and the family and chaotic interior of the 10, Downing Street, of the Blair family) to stage the fundamental opposition of the film, between A woman, the queen, who is the product of history, and a man, Tony Blair, who invented with the help of a few advisers.
Impeccable distribution does justice to this complexity. The royal family is painted without excess of charity: Prince Philip of Edinburgh (James Cromwell) is an insensitive ganache which drags its grandsons at a battered deer to make them forget the death of their mother; Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), both sensitive and helpless in front of his parents, tries to find an ally in the person of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), and the queen mother (Sylvia Syms) proves that the gin preserves but does not hardly develops the love of others.
Downing Street, Tony Blair, who has just been elected, never stops taking the measure of his role. Sheen succeeds in deciphering the Blair mystery, this mixture of voracity and seduction, Catholic good will and ruthless ambition.
This gallery of admirably drawn figures only makes sense by the brilliance of royal performance. A priori, we would have hesitated to hoist Elizabeth II to the dramatic rank held, by Shakespeare interposed, his great (and indirect) ancestors, from Henri II to Richard III.
Peter Morgan is probably not Shakespeare, but Helen Mirren is well worth his royal predecessors, from Garrick to Laurence Olivier. She highlights the breastplates which her character surrounded himself over his life as a monarch, to strip it in a sequence all the more moving since, to this point, Stephen Frears handled the feelings with a Returned more than British, preferring humor and irony.