Alexis Sweet Cahill’s biopic about the Romanian queen is weighed down by stodgy exposition.
Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but “Queen Marie” shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.
Directed by the Italian filmmaker Alexis Sweet Cahill, the movie recounts how the country’s queen, Marie (Roxana Lupu), a British-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria, pressed for a greater Romania — incorporating Transylvania, among other regions — during the postwar peace talks in Paris in 1919.
Exactly what harm President Woodrow Wilson (Patrick Drury), Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France (Ronald Chenery) and Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain (Richard Elfyn) saw in expanding Romania’s borders is never precisely clear from this screenplay. But geopolitical details are not high on the priority list of any movie in which King George V (Nicholas Boulton), in London, informs the Romanian queen, his cousin, of the limits of his power: “There’s very little I can do. We’re a constitutional monarchy, just like yours.”
Surely Queen Marie — shown as a smart, savvy strategist — already knows that. But where the Romanian prime minister (Adrian Titieni) has failed, Marie will step in to make the case, and secure aid for her country, despite the fact that she is presumed to play a limited role in politics and faces skepticism because of her gender and diplomatic inexperience. In this telling, her success was mainly a matter of securing meetings with high-handed world leaders and disarming them. Negotiations are rarely so simplistic.
Queen Marie
Not rated. In English, Romanian, French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
