MOVIE REVIEWS The Duchess (12A)
Director: Saul Dibb
4/5
Rocknrolla (15)
Director: Guy Ritchie
2/5
El Bano Del Papa (15)
Director: Enrique Fernandez and Cesar Charlone
3/5
Bangkok Dangerous (18)
Director: Danny and Oxide Pang
2/5
EVENTUALLY, we will have to endure a warts-and-all big screen account of Princess Diana's tragedy. In the meantime, we are being presented with different prisms through which to regard her. Stephen Frears's The Queen, though primarily about the monarch, spoke volumes about the effect of the People's Princess on the media, politicians and populace. Now The Duchessgives an inkling of how she herself might have felt, trapped in a loveless marriage, in the glare of public scrutiny, with the family calling the shots.
As it happens, its real-life subject is Diana's distant aunt. It's 1774. Seventeen-year-old Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley) is informed by her mother that she is to marry the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), one of the richest men in England. The girl happily enters the arrangement, but it's soon apparent that this charmless man intends to spend only as much time with his bride as will secure a male heir. The marriage descends into chill.
Meanwhile, "G", with a lively mind and a keen sense of fun, simultaneously becomes a powerful supporter of the Whig party and the "empress of fashion" at the heart of London society. As one of her circle observes, Devonshire is "the only person in England not to love his wife".
But it turns out he does have feelings - for G's best friend Bess (Hayley Atwell). Not only that, but he moves his lover into the house and expects his wife to accept it. Then, when she attempts an affair of her own, with young Whig MP Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper), he lays down the law.
The nature of this film, far from fluffy period melodrama, is neatly stated when the Duke and Duchess attend the premiere of Sheridan's play School For Scandal, a thinly veiled exposé of this marriage of belle and boor. Georgiana asks Grey, her would-be amour, why he has not enjoyed the comedy: his reply is that it isn't a comedy, but a tragedy. Based on Amanda Foreman's bestselling biography, this is indeed a tragedy, a devastating rendition of male power and hypocrisy.
It is largely made possible by some admirably nuanced acting. Knightley conveys well the nightmare of a woman imprisoned by the upper class's suffocating codes, while Fiennes and Atwell find thin shafts of light in characters who act diabolically for their own complicated reasons. The magnificent Fiennes also provides the film's acerbic comedy, as when his drunken wife sets fire to her wig and, the social elite gawping uselessly, he clips to a servant: "Please put out her Grace's hair."
The Duchess is directed by Saul Dibb, whose first feature, Bullet Boy, was a contemporary drama involving crime on a London estate, yet here he ably switches to period drama. Guy Ritchie ought to watch and weep. RocknRolla is Ritchie's fourth gangster movie. Perhaps his attempt at new territory, the desert island turkey Swept Away, scared him back into the comfort zone of Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. But unless you're, say, Martin Scorsese, familiarity just breeds contempt.
Expect the usual: a massive cast of villains (Tom Wilkinson, Gerard Butler, Thandie Newton among them), whose seemingly disparate scams messily coalesce; endless voice-over explication and a barrage of underworld lingo with next to no wit; and lots and lots of violence. It takes an age to get going, wilting under the weight of self-delusion, as Ritchie imagines he is making a British Ocean's Eleven.
The pity is that he is not without skill or sharp observation: a misguided robbery of two Russian hard nuts is exciting, funny and imaginatively shot, while a drug dealer's account of his own addicted days is satisfyingly strange. The trouble with Ritchie is less to do with talent than inclination and self'satisfaction. There's a sandwich you can buy in New York called The Elvis, with so much peanut butter, honey and banana that your mouth glues itself shut. When I think of the smugness of RocknRolla, I think of an Elvis.
A rare film from Uruguay, and one of great pathos and humanity, El Bano Del Papa (The Pope's Toilet) relates the true story of the visit by John Paul II to an impoverished town in 1988. With the media promising thousands of visitors from Brazil, the eager locals go into hock for the food stalls that will make their fortunes. Our hero, the smuggler Beto, has his own cunning plan: he will build them a top quality loo. But, as anyone who saw Elite Squad will know, the pope's visits to South America usually end in tears.
The directing Pang brothers have remade their own Thai crime classic, Bangkok Dangerous, for the Americans. There are so many adjustments to the scenario - not least Nicolas Cage in the lead as the assassin who develops a conscience - that comparisons are pointless. In its own right, then: the Bangkok locations, not surprisingly, have an authentic appeal, the action set-pieces are poor, the characterisation hollow. If it's mayhem you want, RocknRolla shades it.
