Watching: Mary Queen of Scots

[white_hart]

I didn't have great hopes of Mary Queen of Scots; the trailer suggested that it might be visually stunning but would play fast and loose with historical accuracy, but it's what was on this week and reading Dorothy Dunnett has given me enough of a fascination with early modern Scotland to want to give it a try.

It was actually much better than I'd thought it would be. Yes, Saoirse Ronan plays Mary with an utterly ahistorical Scottish accent, but Mary is also seen using French by preference with her intimates, and from a pragmatic point of view the Scottish accent was probably better than having Mary spend the entire film sounding like one of the French knights from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And while history records that Mary and Elizabeth never met, the film actually only has one meeting between them, conducted under conditions of such extreme secrecy that it comes across as a vaguely plausible might-have-been rather than a complete defiance of historical fact. I wasn't completely convinced by the reading of Mary as an innocent who was bullied and betrayed by the men around her, but I don't think that's a particularly left-field interpretation.

The film is just as visually stunning as the trailer suggested; lavish costumes, carefully choreographed court scenes and sweeping Scottish scenery (even if I wasn't entirely convinced that all of the scenery was actually where it should be; the wild Highland scenery between Leith and Edinburgh was a bit of a surprise). Ronan and Margot Robbie are both excellent as the two Queens, each surrounded by men, and if the film was much less femslashy than the trailer led me to expect it did deliver an interestingly genderfluid reading of Rizzio and a possibly gender-questioning Elizabeth. It also featured David Tennant chewing the scenery in a very large beard as John Knox and a deeply unpleasant Darnley, a kind of 16th-century Nice Guy (TM) who beguiled Mary by being good at cunnilingus and not even wanting a handjob in return only to desert her as soon as they were married and spend his time drinking, sleeping with Rizzio and trying to be King. (Mind you, having read Lymond and knowing who his parents were this wasn't really surprising behaviour.) All in all, it really wasn't a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a January Thursday.

Comments

[slemslempike]

I think I was lucky because I didn't know much of the history at all, but I surmise by the non-bottle throwing reaction of my Edinburgh co-audience that either the rewriting wasn't too bad, or they didn't know the history either.

I enjoyed it very much, but the meeting scene did make me wish for a French and Saunders parody. Just think of the kay they could have made with the laundry!

[white_hart]

The laundry seemed like rather an odd scenery choice!

[lilliburlero]

I thought it would have been a lot better for taking itself a bit less seriously - even the fun bits, like the gender play with Rizzio, were a bit self-conscious. I'm afraid for all the high-concept artistry of the final meeting, with the two queens suggestively pursuing each other through gauzy bedsheets, the thought 'are they...meeting in a 16th century laundrette? They're meeting in a 16th century laundrette!' irresistibly formed. And I really couldn't work out what was up with Darnley's bum-bags: did costuming chicken out of 1560s puffball breeches and then decide they needed the silhouette after all, or was it actually some unspoken historical in-joke - did the historical Darnley like to keep a lot of ready cash and possessions literally on his person (it seems like foresight uncharacteristic of the utter nincompoop he was), as his son was famous for excessively padded doublets because of a not-altogether unfounded fear of things getting very stabby?

[white_hart]

I thought maybe they were meeting in a laundry for secrecy, though it seemed very out of the way and you'd have thought a laundry would be more central.

He did seem to have a lot of bags slung about him!

[lilliburlero]

Oh, yes, I'm sure that was the notion - I wonder if it was meant to be a sort of nod at modern thrillers where important people meet incognito in very downbeat settings?

Once I spotted it I noticed that some other male characters also had luggage on their thighs, so I think it was wanting a 1560s silhouette without committing to Damn Silly Britches, but Darnley was definitely King of the Fanny Pack, if king of nothing else. Also: colour! I'd love to see a mainstream period movie that did medieval and early modern men's costume in the glorious colours that women's fashion gets, and down with these costumes of Manly (TM) dark grey leather that could, with a tweak or two, almost be photospreads in GQ.

[white_hart]

I did think the sober dark clothing for the men was an intentional choice to show how isolated both Queens were, surrounded by a sea of men. (It reminded me of going to meetings when I worked in the finance division here, tbh.)

I also spent some time wondering if there was a reason why the Earl of Moray was wearing so much eyeliner he looked like Tim Minchin.

[cmcmck]

Shame they never actually met.

The sparks may well have flown!

[andrewducker]

I got the bus from Leith to Central Edinburgh earlier.

I can confirm that there was a saddening lack of highland scenery.

[white_hart]

Yes, while it obviously wouldn't have been built up then I would have expected relatively cultivated land with an uphill slope, not wild heathery hills!