The royal family of England – that delicious modern-day incongruity – has long given the media and the arts an opportunity to swoon or go wild, more or less cheaply. Some memorable works, however, from the ecstatic reports of Léon Zitrone to the recent series The Crown, via the movie The Queen (2006), by Stephen Frears. Today it is the turn of the Chilean director Pablo Larrain to look into the question, from the point of view of this memorable outsider that was Diana Spencer, known as Lady Di, wife in the person of Charles, Prince of Wales, of the heir to the throne, from which she separated in 1992, before finding a tragic death in the car, in the underground of the Alma bridge, in Paris, in 1997.
Pablo Larrain – director of a number of films (Tony Manero, 2008; Santiago 73, post-mortem, 2010; No, 2012) which place it very high in the world hierarchy of auteur cinema – resumed here, after jackie (2017), the motif of the woman brought to the summit of power but tragically lonely within it, crystallizing through the troubled empathy that she arouses a popular myth in which the extreme ambiguity of the relationship of the people to the powerful finds satisfaction. Alas, there is a long way from one film to another. jackie was a reflection on the representation of power, shrouded in poignant melancholy, which Natalie Portman embodied with sovereign haughtiness. spencer is a fairly Manichean film, making Lady Di a victim of the English court, to which Kristen Stewart offers a painful, stiff, not to say outraged interpretation.
Pale oneirism
This international production having been sold in France to the highest bidder, the film can be discovered directly on the Amazon platform, Prime Video, without going through the room. Avoiding the always somewhat academic ambition of the biopic, the film focuses on three days in the life of Lady Di, aspiring to capture the nightmare of loneliness. It was the traditional celebration of Christmas at Sandringham, the private estate of the Windsors, in 1991. Luxury, order, etiquette, cooking pots, tables and straight plans. An army of soldiers, cooks and servants watch over the martial organization of the event. After ten years of a marriage whose misfortune she no longer hides, Lady Di is there, in the name of a protocol that turns into a straitjacket, the woman to watch, to constrain, to break, to humiliate.
The film will not deviate one iota from this dramaturgical challenge, which, despite its plastic beauty and its pale dreaminess, ends up getting tired. The antagonists are reduced to the state of puppets. Kristen Stewart, who is on the other hand from all the plans, adopts a mimetic posture woven with white thread: head tilted to the side, misty eyes, body as if suspended from a hanger, jaw tense by the English accent, she makes herself l incarnation of contained suffering and flouted dignity. This quintessential tableau of the poor little rich girl is singularly lacking in depth and dialectic.
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