Reviews of The Young Victoria
Displaying all 3 reviews
Amir Syarif Siregar
20Apr10
The Young Victoria adalah sebuah drama period yang mengisahkan mengenai masa awal pemerintahan Ratu Victoria dari kerajaan Inggris serta mengenai kisah percintaannya dengan Pangeran Albert dari Jerman. Dibintangi oleh Emily Blunt sebagai Ratu Victoria, film ini diproduseri oleh Martin Scorcese bersama Graham King (The Departed) dan Sarah, Duchess of York.
The Young Victoria sendiri mengisahkan kisah awal kehidupan Victoria (Blunt) yang terlahir sebagai puteri satu-satunya dari Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn dan Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (Richardson). Saat Victoria lahir, kakeknya, King George III, sedang berada di kursi tahta kerajaan. Karena ketiga putera tertuanya tidak memiliki anak yang terlahir dari sebuah perkawinan yang sah, maka Victoria, puteri dari anak keempat King George III, berada di garis kedua untuk menduduki tahta kerajaan setelah pamannya, George IV (Broadbent).
Semenjak kecil, Victoria telah diperlakukan seperti seorang pewaris tahta kerajaan dan sangat dilindungi oleh ibunya, setelah kematian sang ayah. Hal ini membuat Victoria begitu tertutup dari dunia luar dan hal ini membuatnya menjadi seorang gadis dengan jiwa pemberontak. Ketika pamannya, King George IV, meninggal dunia, Victoria akhirnya naik ke tahta kerajaan. Victoria menjadi wanita termuda yang menduduki singgasana ketika ia hanya berusia 18 tahun.
Di saat yang sama, Victoria juga sedang menjalin hubungan dengan sepupu pertamanya, Prince Albert (Friend). Jalinan kisah asmara ini cukup sulit mengingat Victoria saat ini telah berada di posisi sebagai seorang Ratu dan ia juga telah diingatkan bahwa akan ada banyak orang yang berusaha untuk memanfaatkan posisinya. The Young Victoria akan mengisahkan mengenai bagaimana kisah cinta Victoria sekaligus bagaimana cara Victoria untuk tumbuh dewasa menjadi seorang Ratu yang siap untuk memimpin dan melayani para rakyatnya.
Berbeda dengan film-film period yang mengisahkan kerajaan Inggris lainnya, para penonton mungkin akan menemui sedikit kesulitan untuk mencerna bagian awal dari film ini, jika mereka kekurangan informasi bagaimana garis keturunan dari kerajaan Inggris. Menit-menit awal The Young Victoria dihabiskan untuk menggambarkan bagaimana kompleksnya hubungan kekeluargaan dan garis keturunan di keluarga kerajaan. Bukan suatu hal yang buruk, namun tetap saja akan sedikit merumitkan para penonton.
Cerita berikutnya berjalan dengan cukup lancar, kisah asmara antara Victoria dengan Prince Albert, hubungannya yang buruk dengan sang ibu serta kisah naik turunnya popularitas Victoria sebagai seorang pemimpin di kalangan masyarakat. The Young Victoria memiliki cukup banyak sisi penceritaan, namun di lain pihak, hal ini menyebabkan ketidakfokusan pada pengarahan dan menghasilkan The Young Victoria sebagai sebuah film yang tidak benar-benar memberikan kepuasan dalam penceritaan kepada para penontonnya.
Emily Blunt, yang berperan sebagai Victoria, tampil cukup meyakinkan disini, walaupun Blunt sepertinya memiliki wajah yang sedikit terlalu modern untuk memerankan seorang tokoh yang berada di zaman period jika dibandingkan dengan Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley dan Gwyneth Paltrow yang sebelumnya banyak bermain di film-film bertema sama. Namun, sebagai aktris utama film ini, Blunt mampu tampil bersinar dan menghidupkan karakternya. Blunt juga tidak sendirian dalam menghidupkan film ini. Jajaran pemeran pendukungnya juga memberikan peran yang cukup signifikan untuk membuat The Young Victoria sangat dapat dinikmati, walau harus diakui, Blunt adalah pusat perhatian utama di film ini.
Sama seperti halnya film-film period lainnya, The Young Victoria memiliki tata kostum dan setting yang sangat mengagumkan. Ditambah dengan music score yang cukup meyakinkan, The Young Victoria dapat dinilai sebagai sebuah film period yang lumayan memuaskan.
Sebagai sebuah film drama period, The Young Victoria dapat ditempatkan pada kategori film yang memuaskan. Bagi Anda penggemar film-film bergenre serupa, Anda akan mendapati kepuasan visual tersendiri dalam film ini. Sayang, fokus pada penceritaan sedikit terlupakan dengan kurangnya konflik yang benar-benar tajam untuk dapat menarik perhatian penonton. Namun tetap saja hal tersebut tidak benar-benar mengganggu keberadaan The Young Victoria sebagai sebuah film yang cukup dapat dinikmati.
Rating: 4 / 5
- Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
PhillipEJohnston
17Jan10
Great Britain and her citizens value the high drama of their aristocracy in equal measure to how much we Americans value our conquests in war. American audiences look to Hollywood for jingoistic fantasies and (recently) anti-war pictures, just as the Brits seem to crave costume dramas that are alternately revealing and respectful of royalty. The Young Victoria, the most recent addition to this ever-growing category, shares both of those qualities.
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and starring Emily Blunt in the title role, The Young Victoria is a sumptuously beautiful drama brimming with visual detail and loveliness. That alone is enough to warrant seeing as it may very well consume you with its lush sights and sounds, but the movie as a whole is so committed to manners and good taste that it rarely brings its characters to proper life.
The early years of Queen Victoria’s rule of England, as portrayed in Vallée’s film, were turbulent at best. Born the only direct ascendant to the throne, Victoria’s manipulative mother (Miranda Richardson) and her dastardly adviser (Mark Strong; currently seen as Lord Blackwood in Sherlock Holmes) plotted all through her childhood how to manipulate the impressionable young woman once she took the throne.
Controlled, cloistered, and endlessly kept behind closed palace doors, Victoria still remained determined not to sign the Regency document that would give her manipulators legal right to the throne. This jealous drama permeates the first few moments of The Young Victoria, but when the queen finally takes her rightful seat on the throne and lays to waste the hopes of her deceptive relatives, her romance with Prince Albert becomes central.
Albert (Rupert Friend) is the nephew of royalty and has been coached by his advisors on how to win Victoria’s favor. His predictable advances annoy Victoria, but the two forge a bond over their equal hatred of manipulation.
“Do you ever feel like a chess piece yourself? In a game being played against your will?” Victoria asks. Albert empathizes and gives a searing reply: “You had better master the rules of the game until you play it better than they can.” She grants Albert permission to write to her and though political foibles and less-worthy suitors try to muddy the waters, the two marry and rule the kingdom together.
The cast is perfectly suited to the material and culled from the very best selection of British characters actors (the great Jim Broadbent has an amusing bit part), but Emily Blunt is the main attraction and proves, perhaps for the first time, that she is capable of carrying the soul of a film with dignity and grace. She imbues Victoria with the biting self-confidence necessary for a young woman who is pressed to relent on all sides. Her beauty is beguiling.
The script, on the other hand, is not. Penned by Julian Fellowes, a scribe who seemed so adept at structuring class drama when he wrote Robert Altman’s majestic Gosford Park, “Victoria”’s screenplay is structured through voiceover and monologue by way of letters and correspondence written between the historical figures that populate the narrative. It’s a neat trick, but one that gets old after the tenth or eleventh time.
Consequently, the characters we don’t learn about via personal correspondence—Victoria’s mother, The Duchess of Kent; Lord Conroy, the Duchess’s fiendish advisor; Lord Melbourne, one of Victoria’s early advisors— seem to populate the script only because it would be inaccurate for them not to.
Still, the visuals are almost unbearably dignified and sparkle with royal finery. (It seems as if Vallée and his cinematographer have recently discovered the ability to pull focus for emotional affect; they use it multiple times in every scene and it becomes a jolly novelty.) The musical score by Ilan Eshkeri elegantly adapts snippets of Schubert and Handel and plays as big a role in the emotional life of the film as any of the actors. Then there are the costumes by Sandy Powell (The Aviator, Far From Heaven) that will surely win awards for their attention to detail.
Yes, The Young Victoria is that classic case of style over substance. It feels akin to visiting an elegant museum for the sole purpose of looking around for a few moments. We’ve all been guilty of that—perhaps to our shame.
That said, a dose of aristocratic poise might be just enough to calm nerves that have been jangled by the recent onslaught of American war films. If you think The Young Victoria could do you some good, don’t resist her charms.
- Currently 3.0/5 Stars.
jaredmobarak
22Dec09
When I had heard that the closing night film for the 2009 Toronto Film Festival was to be The Young Victoria, I admittedly scratched my head. Why would they choose some run-of-the-mill historical period drama when they could tap a new, exciting experiment instead, closing it in style? Well, I apologize for selling this film short because it is a beautiful piece of art, educating its audience about Queen Victoria at the same time as telling a story of youth, romance, power, and control. Being written by Julian Fellowes should have given me pause to think this film would be more than appearances showed, not to mention a who’s who cast of European actors—a veritable Harry Potter in that regard. Jean-Marc Vallée has brought all the tools at his disposal together and created something that does not become a prison to its genre.
Just as Victoria says in voiceover at the start about how even a palace can be a prison, well, period drama can be as well. How often do these elaborately recreated works become more artifice than substance, looking stunning yet containing nothing more? Vallée makes sure to not allow his vision to fall prey to that sometimes-unavoidable pitfall right from the start. One of the first images we see is a blurred field of color that soon focuses into a line of British sentries in full regalia. The clarity is sharply pointed on about three at a time, slowly going down the line as what once was visible soon fades back into fog. Utilized again later on with a row of wine glasses, the shallow depth of field itself plays a large role in the film’s construction. Ever since Orson Welles perfected the use of a completely clear field of vision with Citizen Kane most films have tried to replicate it, soon having the technique become the norm. Even recent works like Speed Racer used a complete sense of sight to render it similar to the cells of a cartoon, but there is something to be said about blurring. Not only is it a breath of fresh air here—adding depth and visual excitement—but also the precise focal points that result push the viewer’s eye directly to what matters. Here is a director taking full control of his vision, showing us exactly what he wants us to see.
The technique itself wouldn’t be as successful as it is without some wonderful acting to hold our interest and deem the characters worthy of such scrutinized attention. Across the board we are given fully realized interpretations of these historical figures. Much can be said, and will, for Emily Blunt’s portrayal of the young Queen herself, but the surrounding roles all carry their own weight in both shaping who she was to become and bolstering her power with much needed help. Mark Strong is Sir John Conroy, the controller of Victoria’s mother’s estate, the Duchess of Kent, played by Miranda Richardson. Both these actors have the expressiveness and zeal to be villainous and cruel, but appearances here are not so simple. Yes they want power, yes they oftentimes put themselves ahead of the heir to the kingdom, but when all is said and done, they do somehow have her interests in mind, no matter how warped their thought process. Beneath the scowls and temper of Strong lies a compassion and belief that he could have helped and served if only he kept his emotions in check earlier on. The entire film is composed of people with a conflict of duality; they are all surrounding a girl with the potential of greatness, wanting her to succeed while also taking a little something for their own.
And here is the true strength of the story—it is not all about Victoria herself. Being the only child of royal blood from the three brothers in power, she is the inheritor of England when King William passes on. So the fight is on for finding her a politically positioned husband, for being the bird on her shoulder steering her every move, and unfortunately also preying upon her inexperience to take some of her power away. There is current Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, attempting to keep his party in power despite the public consensus that he will lost Parliament in the near future and Victoria’s uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, looking to beat everyone else to the punch by placing his nephew in direct view as a suitor to secure the future of his own country. Ulterior motives run rampant and mistakes are made, causing the public to lose faith in their new queen early on. However, when the stakes become crucially important and the good of the nation is made top priority, all those who have positioned themselves in the sovereign’s inner circle find a way to be practical and honest, allowing her to grow as a leader rather than be just a puppet on display.
So, no matter what these roles begin as, some even causing the audience to harbor some hatred for their duplicitous ways, their humanity does win out causing a recalculation of their true worth. Paul Bettany is great as Melbourne, playing both sides at all times, making it difficult to know if Victoria is simply a pawn in his own chess game; Jim Broadbent is a riot as the drunkard, yet honest to a fault, King William; and Thomas Kretschmann is his usual strong-willed, military-minded self, lending a power to King Leopold that could be seen as hubris awaiting a giant fall. But through all the politics and historical tidbits—I’ll admit to learning a lot during the course of the movie that I had not known about Queen Victoria’s reign—it is the young lovers’ romance between Blunt and Rupert Friend’s Prince Albert that shines above all. Here are two innocent idealists surrounded by power hungry men, only wanting to see the poor and disenfranchised helped, wanting to cause real change and not just serve the rich. Amidst all the greed and selfishness, these two have grown to be of sound heart and soul, finding each other through political maneuvers, but staying together by common ideals and hopes. They are the shining light for England’s future and the focal point of a very well conceived and told film.
The Young Victoria 8/10
http://jaredmobarakreviews.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/the-young-victoria/
- Currently 4.0/5 Stars.