Watching: Mary Queen of Scots
Jan. 24th, 2019 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI 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.
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.
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Date: 2019-01-27 02:57 pm (UTC)