Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10
Cast: Rupert Everett, Sarah Gadon, Bel Powley, Emily Watson, Jack Reynor, Roger Allam, Anastasia Harrold, Ruth Sheen, Jack Laskey, Jack Gordon, Emma Connell, Maria Lee Metheringham, Laurence Spellman, Jessica Jay, Geoffrey Streatfield, Sophie Di Martino, Jack Brady.
If a story is worth telling then perhaps it doesn’t matter how much it strays from the actual version of events, however when the truth of a significant moment in time for a person, regardless of the stature or place in the history books, is distorted and warped, it can hardly be a surprise when half the world suddenly believes it to be the truth and legends grow and falsehoods spread.
Distortion, albeit of the fluffy pillow kind of variety, is more than amply served with a fair bit of indigestion on the side and a small glass of enjoyment in A Royal Night Out, a film so wide of the mark it hurts to watch but also threatens to endear itself onto the senses as you find yourself slowly falling for the charm that you want it to be, whilst knowing deep down you will hate yourself, loathe with a passion, for being placed into the position of falling for a story that doesn’t exist.
One of the things suggested about A Royal Night Out is that it is based on real events, if that is the case, then seeing an elephant swim under water in your local swimming pool should count as a pub tale as having seen the Loch Ness Monster doing water-aerobics on a camping holiday in the Mediterranean. Fluff, it can sell a film and hoodwink an audience, yet somewhere deep down you would want this story of Princess Elizabeth and Princes Margaret, played with sensitivity by Sarah Gadon and with great blistering fun by Bel Powley, the latter proving to be the great role in the film, to be true, to shed some light onto a world you just know cannot exist.
The film doesn’t suffer from lack of pace or from some great one liners, normally when Bel Powley is in the vicinity of the camera, neither does it shrink in the face of its own deception, for in the truth of the matter of a country still fixated on that single defining moment in its history, the deception becomes clearer and more acute.
Sell a story to the American market about their cousins across the pond and dress it up in enough pomp and pageantry and it will be well received, give it a reason to wave the Union Flag and it will sell in many quarters within the confines of the British Isles. It doesn’t excuse the tinges of hypocrisy, it doesn’t absolve the fabrication bundled out but it does make for an entertaining 90 minutes; it is just a shame that the taste of fluff hangs around in the mouth long after the pillow has been removed.
Ian D. Hall