The Young Victoria Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee | Written by Julian Fellowes
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Curiously, the princess craze parallels a trend for grown-up movies about female royalty—dramas that focus less on tiaras and gowns than on the complex problems of women wielding power in a man’s world. Cate Blanchett vaulted into the top rank of stars with her flinty performance as Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and repeated the role in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007). Helen Mirren won a boatload of awards (including an Oscar for best actress) playing the politically compromised Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears’s The Queen (2006). One of the better costume dramas last year was The Duchess, with Keira Knightley as the put-upon Georgiana Spencer, an 18th-century ancestor of Princess Di. And now Emily Blunt has taken on Britain’s longest-reigning monarch in The Young Victoria, which, more pointedly than any of its predecessors, ponders the postfeminist dilemma of how to find happiness in both love and work.
With its PG rating, the movie is perfectly appropriate for girls, and its opening scenes play like a more intelligent and historically grounded version of their G-rated princess dramas. But in this case, being a princess isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As the only legitimate grandchild of George III, Victoria is next in line to the throne after her ailing uncle, King William (Jim Broadbent), yet her widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), conspires with Conroy to keep Victoria a virtual prisoner in Kensington Palace. According to their “Kensington System,” Victoria is prohibited from reading popular books or playing with other children; she must sleep in the same room with her mother every night and take the hand of an adult whenever she goes downstairs. As she approaches her 18th birthday, Conroy becomes ever more insistent that Victoria sign an order of regency and hand over any future monarchical powers to her mother (and, by implication, to him).
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