It was a press conference whose pictures went around the world ten years ago. Bones had been found under a parking lot in Leicester, and now the results of the DNA analysis have been announced: They actually belonged to the legendary King Richard III. from England. The news spread as breaking news around the world. What nobody saw at the time: the most important figure was missing from the podium full of scientists from the University of Leicester – the amateur historian Philippa Langley, who had made the find possible in the first place and commissioned the excavation.
So the bad way of things: A woman sets the world in motion, but her success is stolen by bureaucrats and busybodies and pushed her out of the limelight. A tragedy in reality, but for a classic British underdog film, wonderfully found food.
And even more so for a cinema veteran like Stephen Frears. Throughout his rich body of work, he has explored British milieus and conditions, from everyday life in “Fish & Chips” to the solitary realms of “The Queen”. Steve Coogan, the actor-turned-writer on Philomena specifically to tell the story of combative women, provided him with the idea and script.
“The Lost King” is the name of their second collaboration, which is one of the strongest contributions at the current Munich Film Festival. The film tells the true story of Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), which begins at the bottom. She has chronic fatigue syndrome and loses her job in a call center. She is no longer with her husband. And her energy is barely enough for her two boys of primary school age.
One day, however, she sees a performance of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”, the quintessential villain play in theater history, with Richard as the super villain. Shakespeare’s famous equation of disability and a murderous soul – “so lame and unseemly that dogs bark, I’m limping by” – spontaneously and violently goes against the grain. She begins to study history, gains a different image of the king who fell in 1485 and from then on fights with like-minded people for his rehabilitation: underdogs have to stick together.
Where this obsession is supposed to lead, however, is not clear to her. Until she finds herself in the middle of a desolate Leicester Social Services car park in search of the historic sites of royal life. One of the places where speculation has long suggested the foundations of the ruined monastery of Greyfriars – and thus one of the possible burial sites of Richard’s bones, which have been missing for centuries.
Suddenly there was the certainty of standing on the king’s grave
The film tells it as a ghostly, mystical moment, and that’s exactly how Philippa Langley reports it in her interviews and memories: How she suddenly felt a coldness all over her body, a spiritual presence – seized by the security that can no longer be argued away, directly over the grave to stand of the king.
To make matters worse, the spot was also marked with a thick white “R”. That stood for a “reserved” parking space, but couldn’t it still be a sign? The film illustrates the mystery, with Richard Langley appearing constantly as a vision, not at all crooked like in Shakespeare, but young and friendly. He even talks to her. Ridiculously unscientific? Why, surely. Exactly at the ominous ghost point the bones of the king were actually found.
After this appearance, a large part of the film consists of Philippa Langley being ridiculed or even ridiculed for her intuition by seasoned archaeologists and cynical functionaries. Nevertheless, she remains undeterred and eventually finds allies, for example in Leicester City Council, which, after some hesitation, agrees that the car park may be torn up.
Please dig here! The real Philippa Langley at the King Bones dig site.
(Photo: Graeme Hunter/X-Distribution)
The University of Leicester has a commercial archaeological excavation service that is supposed to do this, but the initiator has to pay for it, and the money is lacking, the university itself can only contribute a small part. Langley initiates a kind of crowdfunding among Richard III fans – there are those too, fuck you, Shakespeare! -, the necessary funds come together as if by a miracle, we can start. You will find something on day one of the excavations.
When you’ve got a potential villain on your hands, you want to draw him drastically
All of this is factually guaranteed. However, some of the officials and archaeologists involved have complained that the film portrayed them unfairly. And it’s true: Frears and Coogan throw in some nasty details. When you’ve got a potential villain on your hands, you want to draw him drastically – they follow the pattern tried and tested by Shakespeare. Unfortunately, one fundamental fact is irrefutable: when the world was told who the found bones belonged to, Philippa Langley was already mercilessly pushed out of the picture.
When it came to the possible find, she was still sitting with on the podium, but no longer in the main event of scientific confirmation. And she wasn’t allowed to use the microphone until all the news cameras had long since been switched off, as the last in a list of twelve speakers. The university, which was actually their contractor, had taken over the matter and put their own scientists, who took over the analysis after the find, in the foreground. The amateur had shrunk along with all her passion to bring up the rear.
The film shows this even more drastically than it already was. It’s a belated revenge, if you will. He describes very precisely the perfidious patterns of keeping small that women have to struggle with in every situation in life, but above all it gets the blood pumping and is wonderfully entertaining. You really can’t ask for more from a film about the remains of a stone-dead monarch.
Finally, the university officials who are now loudly complaining about character assassination, do they still deserve a little pity? Let’s put it this way: When they had the chance to voluntarily put the initiator of their sensational success in the limelight of the world press, even if it was only for a minute – they preferred not to. Everything else follows from that, or as the incomparable Taylor Swift would put it: Karma is a cat that purrs in the lap of those with a clear conscience.