Morelia International Film Festival

Not unlike Mike Hodges, the British director honoured in the fourth edition of the Morelia Film Festival, Stephen Frears is a marvellously modest filmmaker -not in his achievements (he’s undoubtedly one of the most successful and most highly regarded directors to have emerged from Britain in the last few decades), but in his attitude to his own particular role in the filmmaking process. It’s unlikely that Frears would ever claim the lofty title of auteur; indeed, he frequently alludes to his dependence on good writers, and has an engaging tendency, when asked what he himself brings to a movie, to shrug as if faintly bewildered and embarrassed by the question, and offer a smiling but somewhat helpless ‘I’m not really sure.’

Actually, of course, he knows exactly what he brings to any given movie, and he can be very eloquent about it; it’s not only the students he has taught at Britain’s National Film and Television School who testify to his inspirational skills. But the truth is that Frears is in many ways a profoundly pragmatic filmmaker, and prefers not to wax too artily about what he does, which for him seems to consist mainly of finding solutions to certain fundamental problems to do with telling a story, understanding characters, and getting to know a place, an era, a community.

And that’s why his best films ring so true. It matters little whether they were made for television (and a great deal of his work was originally made for the BBC or Channel Four) or specifically for the movie palaces. What counts for Frears is not some grand overriding vision of Life or The World or The Cosmos; it’s about getting things right in terms of characters’ actions, thoughts, emotions and their relationship to the world around them. That of course is one reason why The Queen is such a fine achievement. No one outside of Her Majesty’s immediate circle has a clue what Elizabeth Windsor and her family are really like – we haven’t, writer Peter Morgan hasn’t an Stephen Frears certainly hasn’t. Nevertheless, working from Morgan’s script with the help of some very talented actors, the director manages to convey very plausibly indeed not only what various royals might be like as human individuals but also – and this is probably more difficult and definitely more important in terms of artistic achievement – what life might be like for them; after all, these people are extremely remote from the experience of everyday existence as most of us know it.

But there’s actually more to The Queen than that. Without ever underlining the point, Frears turns a small, very specific story about a brief period in the lives of some very famous, very rich Brits into a subtle meditation on certain worrying developments in the modern world: not just our obsession with celebrity, but the social, political and ethical consequences of our ever-increasing dependence on television images and tabloid-style stories. Among many other things, The Queen hints that some people – prominent politicians included, perhaps – no longer distinguish too clearly between appearance and reality; some of us even seem to believe that we ‘know’ and ‘love’ total strangers, like Diana. There’s an increasingly widespread inability or reluctance to discern the reality or falsehood not only of what’s out there in front of us – what we can see and hear – but also of what’s inside us: what we feel. Should we still put faith in our own emotions, when they can so easily fall prey to media manipulation? That’s quite a complex, thorny topic for a modest little movie to deal with.

I’m not claiming that Frears is proffering some heavyduty philosophical statement or moral message; rather that his film provides us with a great deal to think about even as we’re laughing at jokes and gaining a few insights into what it might mean to have been an outsider ever since one’s royal birth. The Queen finds Frears on peak form, but its many virtues are also characteristic of his ability to take a simple subject and develop it into something that’s thematically rich and resonant – at the same time as telling a truly engrossing story.

The films in this small tribute are the product of a rare and special talent –for doing something that’s actually very complicated, and making it look easy.

by Geoff Andrew