A review of the new film “Victoria & Abdul”
Queen Victoria has now replaced Sherlock Holmes as the most featured character on British screens. According to a study by the British Film Institute, the monarch is now jointly tied with James Bond on 25 films. This is thanks to “Victoria & Abdul” (2017) which is a kind of companion piece to the earlier “Mrs Brown” (1997): both works star the inestimable Judi Dench as the British Queen in a relationship with a court outsider in an attempt to assuage her loneliness (indeed the new film mentions the friendship of the earlier film).
Like all good football matches, “Victoria & Abdul” is a game of two halves. The first half is played for laughs with Abdul (Bollywood rising star Ali Fazal) and his Indian companion Mohammed (Adeel Akhtar) acting like Laurel & Hardy or R2D2 & C3PO and the various British establishment characters presented in rather sterotypical or satirical manner.
But then the second half is much more serious with Victoria making very plain the sorrow of widowhood and the isolation of court life and struggling to make her “Munshi” (Indian Secretary) an intimate part of her life even when all around her – especially son ‘Bertie’ (Eddie Izzard) – are utterly opposed to the friendship and Abdul himself proves to be something of a charlatan.
It seems that this remarkable true story only became known in any detail through the relatively recent discovery of Abdul’s diaries and, at a time of significant Islamophobia in the Western world, the idea that a British monarch and a Muslim clerk could have such a meaningful friendship resonates powerfully. Director Stephen Frears and writer Lee Hall have crafted a work that manages to be both entertaining and topical in a very British movie that will have international appeal.