The Young Victoria
Just here for Emily Blunt, this is a very short and narrow look at a small part of Victoria’s life, focused exclusively on palace intrigue, not even a glimpse into the outside world.
Figures, since it was directed by a random Frenchman, and produced by Fergie herself (of Royal Juicer fame) and Scorsese(!). I really thought the Royal Juicer bit was a skit from The Windsors…
Vicky is just a regular girl, inheritor of the biggest Empire the world has ever seen. Her uncle is an half senile old fart, who hates our hero’s mum for frolicking with a damn Irishman, so she’s under a lot of pressure.
Not as much pressure as the choice of husband, which comes down to some random cousin never introduced, the PM, or another family member from abroad, the kid from good old Leopold, the one with a personal fief in Africa. Good old Saxe-Coburg-Gothe, always scheming.
Leopold’s boy in our anodyne Albert, a “penniless” son of the Belgian head of state, force into a zany scheme to fuck her cousin so that Congo is not taken away by another European power.
They are mostly friendly, but they marry on their second date, so what do I know. Ironically, their relationship is not really developed much further. The focus shifts to her reign, how she cuddles the Whig PM and loathes Robert Peel.
Eventually, Albert takes a bullet meant for her, and so they remain happy ever after. At least 20 years, before Albert dies of typhoid. This is all included as intertitles. Show, don’t tell.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.