A Royal Night Out
Director: Julian Jarrold
Starring: Rupert Everett, Emily Watson, Sarah Gadon, Bel Powley, Jack Reynor
Four stars
In a week when the British royal family could do with some good PR – thanks to that rather unfortunate picture that surfaced of Queen Elizabeth II as a young girl, making a Nazi salute with her mother – A Royal Night Out arrives like a soothing balm. Very loosely based on a true story, it's a gentle reminder of why the British monarchy has survived for as long as it has. Indeed, it may even elicit sympathy – as Princess Elizabeth, eight years before her coronation, is told: "The life we live is not fully our own."
Rather like director Julian Jarrold's 2007 film Becoming Jane, which fictionalised the love life of Pride and Prejudice author Jane Austen, this takes a real-life royal incident and runs with it. Actually, the script by Trevor De Silva and Kevin Hood not so much runs as sprints, with its story set on the evening of VE Day on May 8, 1945. The day when Britain celebrated Victory in Europe, at the end of the Second World War, so the story goes, the future Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and her sister Princess Margaret went out to join the festivities.
It's a delicious notion: a right royal knees-up, as the British tabloids might put it, with the two princesses mixing with the commoners. In truth, their majesties went to the five-star Dorchester Hotel to do their partying. But A Royal Night Out takes the notion in amusingly comic directions. Think of it like a refreshing bookend to The King's Speech – though here, instead of Colin Firth as the princesses' stuttering father, King George VI, we have Rupert Everett, offering up a restrained and rather frail interpretation of the reluctant monarch.
Playing the leads are two fine young stars: Canadian actress Sarah Gadon (best known for her trio of roles for David and Brandon Cronenberg – A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis and Antiviral) gives a delicately etched turn as the feisty but fiercely loyal Elizabeth. But it's British newcomer Bel Powley who steals the show as a fun-loving, party-hopping Margaret; after Powley's breakout turn in this year's Sundance Film Festival hit The Diary of a Teenage Girl, this potentially tricky role proves just what comic timing and range she has. Expect a long and illustrious career to follow.
Credit is also due to Laurence Dorman for his production design, which brilliantly recreates war-torn London, as the two siblings head for a night out, lose their chaperones and then get split up from each other. While Powley’s Margaret indulges herself in glasses of champagne and frolics in the fountain at Trafalgar Square, Gadon’s more earnest Elizabeth spends her time looking for her sister, as she bounces between Soho, Chelsea Barracks and East End pubs, even travelling on a double-decker bus (though, in true royal fashion, without any money). Coming to her aid is Jack Reynor’s kindly but cynical young soldier, Jack, who doesn’t hold back on his anti-royalist views.
Co-starring Emily Watson as the Queen Mother, the idea that the two princesses could slip out into the streets unnoticed might seem ludicrous today. But Jarrold's film never lets this fairy-tale fantasy get out of hand, balancing the story with just enough plausibility (this is, after all, in the pre-internet age). Likewise, proper decorum is shown in the romantic stirrings between Jack and his royal accomplice. For a story that could so easily have got it wrong, A Royal Night Out seems to hit the right notes time and again. Bright, breezy and charming to the last, there's not an ounce of cynicism here. It's enough to make you raise your glass and pronounce, "God save the Queen".
• A Royal Night Out opens in UAE cinemas on Thursday, July 23.
artslife@thenational.ae
