If you expect to spencer, available since Monday on Amazon Prime Video, it teaches you a host of things about Lady Di, get ready for a big disappointment. Pablo Larrain’s film, with Kristen Stewart in the title role, does not seek to dig into the vein of the biopic (biographical work) stuffed with more or less significant historical anecdotes at the The Crown.
Interviewed by vulnerability last year, the Chilean director warned: “People can say to themselves before seeing him: ‘We’re really going to understand who this person was.’ No ! You have the wrong number ! You are in the wrong movie! That’s not what we do! We just try to work around that person and create a fable out of that. »
Moreover, there is no deception on the goods, spencer affirms from the outset, from the introductory cartoon, to be “a fable taken from a real tragedy”. The action takes place at Christmas 1991, over 72 hours. The royal family gathers for the holidays at Sandringham House and Diana arrives there reluctantly. “I believe she was an eminently mysterious person. And even though I read a lot about her and documented myself, I still don’t know who she really was. This kind of mystery must be acted out, evoked, ”confided the filmmaker to the Canadian daily The Press.
fairy tale and nightmare
The film turns out to be a variation on the story of the princess trapped in the castle, waiting to be freed. Lady Di is trapped in protocol rules and permanent control. She doesn’t even have a say in the choice of her outfits. Time slips away from her and only seems to revolve around the meals that horrify her, she who is bulimic. Pablo Larrain borrows the codes of fairy tales, transposes them to the Great Britain of the 1990s and occasionally gives them a nightmarish patina.
The Chilean director presents Diana above all as a “princess of hearts” suffering from her status and her popularity. She feels constantly hunted, in the sights of the royal family, the media, and history with a capital H.
spencer tells the story of a woman wishing to escape posterity. Or the opposite of jackie, one of Pablo Larrain’s previous films, released in 2017. The storyline followed Jackie Kennedy in the hours and days following the assassination of JFK. She, whose time of mourning did not have time for intimacy, struggled to organize a national funeral, a promise that her husband would leave a mark in history. Above all, he must not be allowed to fall into oblivion.
“She had made it her mission to protect the heritage [de JFK] and give it shape. In doing so, she made him a legend and unknowingly became an icon,” the filmmaker explained. at rogerebert.com. If Pablo Larrain incorporated real archive images in the middle of the fiction filmed in 16mm, in carefully reconstructed sets, he kept in mind that there is not a single definitive truth for each individual. “Jackie was Jacqueline Bouvier, who became Kennedy, then Onassis. On his grave in Arlington is written Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was so many women! She was several characters at the same time, ”he noted in the columns of First.
One month before the release in France of jackie, another film by Pablo Larrain was showing in theaters in France: Neruda. The action takes place in 1948, in Chile. After senator and poet Pablo Neruda criticizes the government, President Videla orders his removal. The man of letters must then hide, but plays cat and mouse with the inspector who is tracking him.
“Poetic Atmosphere”
Here again, it is not the historical rigor that preoccupied the filmmaker in priority. Fiction has fun with cinematographic grammar, dares deliberate false connections, changes of scenery from one shot to a reverse shot… In the press kit, the director justified his bias: “We never thought of taking seriously to paint the portrait of the poet, quite simply because it was impossible. That’s why we decided to make a film based on invention and play. So that the spectator can soar with his poems, with his memory, and even with his Communist ideology of the Cold War. »
Pablo Larrain therefore does not make biopics but anti-biopics. “You can’t pin down Pablo Neruda or Jackie Kennedy,” he assured RollingStone five years ago (and he would no doubt say the same of Diana Spencer). “You have to create a poetic atmosphere rather than having actors reciting someone else’s words. You have to feel the life in them. Because otherwise, what you do will oscillate between bad taste and irrelevant. »
With Vulture, the Chilean drives the point home by summarizing what made the coherence of this informal trilogy: “I don’t think I’ve ever made a biopic. I think that Neruda, jackie and spencer are films about people in certain circumstances where everything is about to explode. So look at these works focusing on the buildup, detonation, and blast.