A Royal Night Out: as fluffy and sugary as a Victoria sponge
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Version 0 of 1. A Royal Night Out (2015)Director: Julian JarroldEntertainment grade: C+History grade: D The end of the second world war in Europe was marked by VE Day on 8 May 1945. “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing,” said Winston Churchill (whose broadcast is used in this film). There followed three days of uproarious celebration in London. Family Princesses Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and Margaret (Bel Powley) are planning to celebrate VE Day with a night on the town. But Lil and Margo have to make their escape past their parents, King George VI (Rupert Everett) and Queen Elizabeth (Emily Watson). The future Queen Mother is having none of it. “Does she think I’m going to end up on the front page of the Daily Mirror in the arms of a drunk sailor or something?” complains Margaret – who, as royal watchers will know, is destined to spend the 1970s swanning around Mustique in a kaftan with Mick Jagger, and having it orf with a landscape gardener 17 years her junior. It seems her mother already has her number. Anyway, the king relents, and they are permitted to sally forth. Romance Thus far, A Royal Night Out is fairly accurate. It peels off into completely fictional territory from the minute both princesses get done up in pink frocks (Elizabeth, as a second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, wore her uniform that night) and are given two military chaperones to take them to a party in their honour at the Ritz, which is full of geriatrics. In real life, the princesses were allowed simply to go out into the crowds. Their expedition was made in a group of 16, including their nanny “Crawfie”, several friends their own age and military protection including Group Captain Peter Townsend. Townsend was, at the time, 30 years old and still married; Princess Margaret was just 14. Their famous and, at the time, scandalous romance is not thought to have begun until 1947, when she was 17. And does this film touch on this potentially juicy aspect of the story? Not with somebody else’s bargepole, ma’am. The soldiers escorting the princesses in the movie are fictional comedy boneheads who only get busy with non-royal women. Group Captain Townsend is nowhere to be seen. Related: A Royal Night Out review – Windsor princesses’ romp on the mild side More romance The princesses ditch their chaperones and discover champagne, buses, crowds, pubs, the reasons normal people carry money, the working class, spontaneity, predatory old men who spike your drinks, and decent young men with chips on their shoulders. This last is a fictional airman, Jack (Jack Reynor), hauled in to provide the romantic element of the romantic comedy along with a moment of earthy war grit – though don’t worry, it really is only a moment and it’s over very quickly. Elizabeth tumbles off things to land flat on top of him, twice, and together they plod through the predictable beats of loathing each other, then being thrown together, then, golly oh gosh, perhaps they really like each other. Since the film-makers have made Jack and this entire plot up anyway, you may find yourself wishing they’d given her future majesty a more thrilling night of misrule. Yet A Royal Night Out seems ever conscious of its intended audience – royalists – and carefully restrains its imagination accordingly. Elizabeth’s romance is so coy that the camera moves discreetly away when she and Jack have their sole kiss. Scandal The film saves its mild excesses for the naughty sister, Margaret, who briefly carouses around a brothel (no, of course this didn’t really happen). It ignores the fact she was 14, casting a 23-year-old actress to make her interest in men (and their interest in her) a little less challenging. In real life, according to Princess Elizabeth’s own lady-in-waiting, Jean Woodroffe, the most riotous the royal party got was spotting some random drunken revellers shagging in Green Park. Elizabeth’s cousin, Margaret Elphinstone (now Margaret Rhodes), remembered they crashed an event at the Ritz, which was presumably the inspiration for the film’s fictional planned party earlier. “I think we rather electrified the stuffy people inside,” she told a Channel 4 documentary. “All I can really remember is old ladies looking faintly shocked.” They danced the Lambeth Walk, the hokey-cokey and the conga, and sang We’re Going to Hang Out Your Washing on the Siegfried Line and Roll Out the Barrel. “It was such a happy atmosphere,” said Princess Elizabeth’s close friend Lord Porchester, who was in the royal party. “Such a tremendous feeling of being alive.” The whole group of 16 stuck together from 10pm, when they left, until they returned to Buckingham Palace at 1am. There is almost nothing of what really happened in the movie, except the conga. Verdict A Royal Night Out is a fluffy, sugary, royalty-loving, historically preposterous confection, which will delight those who like that sort of thing – and leave those who don’t feeling like they’ve just spent 97 minutes being force-fed Victoria sponge. |