Since yesterday was November 16th, I guess that was the day the print was going to leave town, so they had to get us in just under the wire.
(Do prints "leave town" anymore? Are there prints? I don't think so.)
I was a bit tricked walking into Cinema Kino, the cinema below my office, when I saw staff pouring champagne into flutes and mixed drinks into tumblers. But that, bewilderingly, was the opposite direction of where my Lost King screening was. Had they made some mistake?
Not only was there no champagne, there wasn't even a free popcorn and drink, which you often get at these screenings. And I'd eaten nothing before the 6 p.m. start, anticipating such treats.
Upon leaving, I finally figured out that the alcoholic drinks were part of some gala associated with the closing of the festival, attended by fancier people than I. I don't know what movie they showed, but given this poster, it's reasonable to assume it was also The Lost King, just in a different auditorium. The fancy people turned left when they went into the theater, and the unwashed critics with our backpacks and slightly askew hair turned right.
I was going to call this post "My unwitting attendance at the British Film Festival," since in the past I have written about other film festivals that occurred at Palace Cinemas, the German Film Festival and the Scandinavian Film Festival. Then, though, something substantive about the film made me change the title, which I'll get to in a minute.
I suppose you wouldn't know automatically that the picture above of Steve Coogan, Sally Hawkins and a third guy you've probably never heard of (his name is Harry Lloyd) was from The Lost King, especially if you've never heard of the movie. But you've heard of Coogan, Hawkins and director Frears, so you should be hearing about this movie soon.
You've also heard about the tidbit of news from ten years ago now where they found the unceremoniously buried body of Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester (or "carpark" as they say here and in Britain). This is the movie about how that came to occur, and it's delicious subject matter for the always fruitful, not always satisfying genre of "recreation of quirky minor news event from the last 20 years."
Of course finding the buried body of a former king of England is not a minor event in most traditional senses of that phrase, and the circumstances that led to it are rather amazing and improbable.
The thing I found of most interest is how closely this marries up with the first movie I ever named my best of the year, back in 1996 -- and how much this movie felt like it could have been heading for a similar fate. Which also makes it a great thing to have occurred in a year in which I'm looking at all my previous #1s.
(I'll save you the drama and confirm that The Lost King is not a realistic contender for my #1 movie of 2022, but the fact that it was even in the conversation is saying a lot.)
1) Both The Lost King and Looking for Richard involve Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, brought to the larger world in Shakespeare's play of the same name, who was thought to have had a hunch, to have killed his nephews, and to have been in desperate need of a horse moments before his death on the battlefield in 1485.
2) Both The Lost King and Looking for Richard view the king through a modern lens, in the latter case as an attempt to understand Shakespeare better in the 1990s, and in the former case to find his body.
3) The name of the project designed to raise money to locate Richard's corpse was the Looking for Richard Project. Which almost makes me wonder if it was a conscious allusion to the name of the 1996 movie, since this was all happening around 2010 (with a culmination of the events in 2012). (One terrible failure of accuracy, though, was that Hawkins' character's kids go to see Skyfall at a fairly early point of the narrative, and that film wasn't released until two months after Richard's body was discovered. For shame!)
The big difference between the two is that I never realized, from the earlier film, that there was a significant quantity of people out there who feel like Richard was improperly branded a usurper, who support his legitimate claim to the throne, and who thought that the traits ascribed to him (the hunch and the predilection for nephew murdering) were propaganda pushed by the new Tudor regime in trying to help the populace embrace the new king, Henry VII. After all, Shakespeare's play was written more than a hundred years after Richard's death, so how certain should we be of its accuracy?
It was actually a campaign by the Richard III Historical Society, of which Hawkins' Philippa Langley was (and I assume still is) a member, that led to the digging up of that carpark and the identification of Richard's remains.
I won't say any more because I owe it to The Lost King to allow you to discover for yourself the other twists and turns along the way. It's well worth it.
I will say that I'm glad I didn't opt out of this screening to attend another one the same night. The advanced screening for The Menu, which comes out next Thursday, was also held last night, across town. I did RSVP The Lost King first, which was one of the main reasons I stuck with it -- even though I don't like holding onto a review until the film releases six weeks later. (In part because I have trouble forcing myself to write such a review so long in advance, and by the time I do get around to it, I've forgotten some of what I wanted to say.) Fortunately, having to only walk downstairs from my office to attend this screening was a deciding factor.
Interestingly, because Looking for Richard has dropped a little in my estimation after my second viewing, I may actually like The Lost King better -- or that could just be recency bias. Either way, it was a delight, largely because of a fun narrative device that I won't spoil, that blends the realistic events with a bit of fantasy. In any case, you should check it out.
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