This was a perfect companion for The Favourite on a double-feature date night with myself. Highly recommend the pairing, though lots of wine would have been nice.
While The Favourite was easily, well, my favorite of the screenings, Mary Queen of Scots has a lot to offer. Though arguably a remake of the 1971 film of the same name -- starring the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson -- this new film owes a lot to its time and place. It's the sort of revisionist history porn that we all love feel guilty about, but keep indulging anyway. Think I'm wrong? Look at The Tudors and the host of shows it inspired and that keep making history sexy and soapy. Look at one of my favorite flicks, The Other Boleyn Girl, and the extent to which it obsesses over style and smut while sacrificing history at the altar. It's a magnificent aesthetic, one that loves history so much that it allows itself to take liberties.
Don't forget, these are films. Not history books. So get off your high horse.
Mary Queen of Scots begins with Mary Stuart (Saoirse Ronan) returning home to Scotland after being the Queen of France and widowed at the age of 18. Everything is set against her ruling in her homeland, from the Protestants taking over to her cousin Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) having assumed rule over both England and Scotland. The film focuses of course on Mary, establishing her household and plans for domination in spite of overwhelming opposition and open violence. The two queens regard each other from afar, admiring and testing their strengths while timidly seeking for answers. The world of men they inhabit is dangerous, and they know that far much more than their crowns are at stake.
Politics and religion, money and laws, rebellion and warfare aside, the film seems most interested in the private lives of these women. Though some will argue it's more fanciful than realistic to fantasize thus about the sexual exploits of these women, the film works because of its fascinating split between private and public realms. Just look at their costumes, inviting appraisal as well as interest, or the constant use of windows and doorways as frames for us to view both the inner and the outer. We're assaulted by endless facades, from the thick white makeup on Elizabeth's face to the translucent sheets adorning the barn in which our queens eventually meet.
Their adventures through worlds of men and sex seem awfully timely for this era, and the film is deeply queer in its attitudes. Leave it to screenwriter Beau Willimon -- developer and showrunner of House of Cards -- to acutely examine this most fascinating of boundaries between high politics and eroticism, suggesting that major points of history were dictated by a man eating out his queen or by the same man seducing another man in her retinue. Set in a crumbling castle in the exotic highlands, it becomes weirdly difficult to imagine anything else having happened in reality. Why shouldn't we review history as sexy? Otherwise, it's all too depressing and boring.
IMDb: Mary Queen of Scots
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