The Royals, Maria: Reviews This Week

The Royals Is A Royal Bore

The Royals is a hallowed congregation of abysmal writing and disinterested filmmaking, and the union is specifically designed to make only one unit suffer: the audience.
Ishita Sengupta reviews.

Dir: Priyanka Ghose, Nupur Asthana

Cast: Ishaan Khatter, Bhumi Pednekar, Zeenat Aman, Sakshi Tanwar

Streaming on: Netflix

NETFLIX'S THE ROYALS , the series about royalty and their way of life, is a fitting example of everything wrong with the streamer. The new eight-episode show is evidence of its cautious programming and the tendency of backing projects where actors are seen more chilling by the pool than uttering lines, and shot changes are excuses for wardrobe revamps. The Royals is a hallowed congregation of abysmal writing and disinterested filmmaking, and the union is specifically designed to make only one unit suffer: the audience.

On paper, it is tempting to like something like The Royals. The stakes are constantly low, and the premise is as far-removed from reality as credible information is from major news studios in India. The aesthetic is pleasing to the eye (the neon-lit colour grading of Netflix, finally, takes a back seat) and the superfluity of the setting is a far cry from the real-life based template-driven true crime shows that have clogged every pore of the streamer’s slate. The triviality also calls for a leeway in expectations that, ideally, should serve a show like this.

But even within such undemanding ambit, The Royals fails to commit and mine the excess of its doing, that something like Four More Shots Please! It is not wholly incidental that both shows have the same set of creators (including director Nupur Asthana), but if the Amazon Prime series carried a genuine sense of female camaraderie within the gloss, then The Royals is too busy performing the frills.

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Maria: Angelina Jolie Is Hypnotically Good In Pablo Larrain’s Biopic About A Star In Decline

Unlike Larrain’s other films about illustrious but broken women, Maria is possibly his most restrained when it comes to latching onto the bait of an out-and-out tragedy, writes Manik Sharma.

Dir: Pablo Larrain

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino

Streaming on: Lionsgate Play

“YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF THE PAIN , it takes to pull music out of your belly, out of your poor mouth,” Maria Callas, played by a distraught Angelina Jolie, bemoans in Pablo Larrain’s Maria . It’s a sequence that captures the dastardly beauty of a once-iconic starlet, struggling to come to terms with the decline of the prestige that accompanied her to the peak. Beneath this prestige, though, there has always been this layer of disgruntlement, the feeling that even at the heights of her powers, an artist is more object than subject. This latest addition to the Chilean’s considerable oeuvre of biopics featuring women at bay ( Spencer, Jackie ) is probably his most affecting, unglamorous sojourn yet. It’s a demanding watch, but for Jolie’s eerie performance, it’s well worth your time.

In Paris, in the 1970s, the world’s most famous opera singer, Maria Callas, is trying to engineer a last hurrah of sorts. She is ill, mentally crushed, visibly tortured, but still believes there is one last performance in her. It’s possibly the tragedy of being an artist, or of the fragile stature that comes with becoming an icon. The lights might dim in the theatre, but they never quite dim in your head. That hedonism is now duct tape for biopics about the unhinged decline of the once-legendary artists. The formula is the same. On some level, without ego there can be no brilliance. The formation of legend demands the suspension of self-doubt. Because unless you believe you are the greatest, maybe no one else will. From that familiar territory, though, Larrain and Jolie pull something irreverent and fresh.

Large parts of the Chilean director’s film are set in post-war Paris, bedecked with beautiful sights that contradict the hauntingly shallow countenance of Jolie walking its streets, as if to liven its venues. Or to reminisce about a past that, though a public spectacle, has also always been a personal ordeal. Women, or at least popular women, live between that frail front window of performance and the cracked, inner wall that accumulates grime, dust and wounds by the day. The film's pivot is a TV interview that Callas has granted, four years into retirement. It helps piece together her life from Nazi-occupied Greece, to becoming the plaything in a torrid love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), to climbing the popularity charts in the US and Europe. Possibly the first artist to become a transcontinental voice in those days.

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