MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
Directed by Josie Rourke
Cert 15. 124 mins
If you like history don’t see this film, it will irritate you beyond words. Very loosely based on the turbulent events of the late 1500s, it is a postmodern, diversity-obsessed muddle.
Even the casting and costumes are an eclectic mix of Game of Thrones and Star Wars, with black and half-Chinese courtiers and a bisexual Lord Darnley thrown in for good measure, his cronies dressed in hi-tech polished leather from Milan.
Feminist flags
The central characters, Mary (Saorise Ronin) and Elizabeth (Margot Robbie), each flying the feminist flag in her own way, showed up all the males as jealous, misogynistic parasites. Add to the mix the psychopathic John Knox, a pantomime figure representing the sinister evangelicals, and the stage is set.
Revolutionary
Mary appears as the revolutionary, ahead of the curve, riding across the Highlands on a horse borrowed from the Lloyds Bank advert, charming the court and defying even the Scottish weather, which fails to disturb her freshly-set hairstyle.
South of the border, we find Elizabeth the sexually-frustrated virgin with a permanent identity crisis fighting off ‘the pox’ as well as the suitors and the tempestuous Scots.
Of course it would be naïve to expect anything which took the times seriously, especially from a religious perspective, but even the BBC’s Wolf Hall avoided the crassness of this showpiece, proving it can be done!
Religious bickering
In a secularised culture such as ours, the religious controversies of the past are dismissed as the bickering of unenlightened men jockeying for power, whilst the women and children look helplessly on. Hence, eternal and spiritual realities are dismissed as unworthy. Indeed, the notion that people might give up their freedom and even life itself for the sake of their conscience is beyond the ken of the secularist.
The current assumption that truth is internalised and negotiable means that cinema is easily hijacked by the unscrupulous with only money in mind. History is especially vulnerable in an age in which fact and fantasy are almost indistinguishable and the content of education is conditioned by postmodern suspicion of anything that went before.
