by Denis Barnett
Sat Sep 2, 2006 Yahoo News
VENICE (AFP) - One of the year's most anticipated movies, Stephen Frears' "The Queen" starring Helen Mirren, has become an early contender for the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival when it was lauded by critics ahead of its world premiere. Frears and his cast were greeted with whoops and cheers at a press conference at the Venice Lido before its first official screening on Saturday night.
The film has generated the most interest of the eight films screened so far of the 21 in the official competition of the festival, which concludes next weekend. Among its admirers was US film-maker Spike Lee who said as he left a preview early Saturday: "It's great."
Frears' movie portrays the attempts of newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Blair to persuade a distant Queen Elizabeth II to reconnect with the British public after the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in August 1997, and shows a family in crisis unable to respond to the country's grief.
"It's been my most frightening project," Mirren told reporters when asked what it was like to play a monarch who has dominated British public life for over half a century. "It's a no-win situation playing someone who's alive."
"The only image I can come up with is that she's like your parent's sofa, the one that you grew up with as a child...that you've come to know like the back of your hand. It's the most familiar thing in your life. In some weird way the queen is like that. But at the same time a completely enigmatic and unknown thing for all of us."
Royal aides were forced to deny Italian newspaper reports on the eve of the premiere that the queen's lawyers had been dispatched to Venice to view the movie, which paints an unflattering portrait of the monarch and her family.
"We are not aware of legal problems. There is no tradition of the royal family suing anybody or anything," producer Andy Harries said. "Their position is one of distance from the film."
Mirren called the film "a humanistic look during a very trying time in a strange family."
"The film is trying to extricate from the concept of the monarchy the human being, getting into their humanity," she said, adding that the family was "sometimes absurd people because they live in an extremely anachronistic way."
"The Queen" combines news footage with political analysis and razor sharp dialogue from scriptwriter Simon Morgan, who plundered interviews with royal staff and palace insiders to provide a glimpse of what happens when old-world royal reticence clashes with populism and informality as personified by Blair.
Diana herself, and the mourning for her, is omnipresent in the movie. There are few scenes where the television is not on, whether it be in Blair's constituency home, his Downing Street offices, or in Balmoral, the Scottish estate where the queen waits out the public storm over her refusal to join the public grieving by millions of her citizens.
Apart from innuendo, the film skirts investigations into what caused Diana's death. Instead it concentrates on the intense human drama that went on behind the scenes in the contacts between the youthful modernizer Blair, who had swept to a landslide election victory four months earlier, and the tradition-bound queen.
"I was taken in more and more by a woman of a certain age getting into a mess really so we become more and more sympathetic towards her," said Frears.
Morgan said the most interesting aspect of the film was the royal family's behaviour, adding that the production company's lawyers had "poured over" the script to avoid libel charges.
Instances of Prince Charles' "eccentric behaviour" in the film "are all substantiated," he said.
Michael Sheen, who reprises the role of Blair he previously played in Frears' TV film "The Deal", does a remarkable job at mimicking Blair's grin and mannerisms, while Mirren's portrayal of an emotionally landlocked monarch enthrals.
The film will be released in Britain on September 15.