2023-10-10 14:47:43
The Lost King Culture
Shakespeare lügt!
As of: 4:06 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
The King and Her: Philippa and Richard III.
Source: Graeme Hunter/X RENTAL
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Against bureaucrats and know-it-alls: “The Lost King” by Stephen Frears celebrates the woman who found the remains of King Richard III. found again. It is the second film in a very British genre that was invented on Netflix a year ago.
Stephen Frears’ new film features something that has probably never been seen before in the entire history of cinema and literature: William Shakespeare as a villain. His crime is that, as a propagandist for the Tudor royal family that ruled at the time, he attacked the last pre-Tudor king, Richard III. as a usurper, villain and even child murderer. Wrongfully so, as Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) believes after she begins to deal with the supposed monster. In order to give Richard a burial as the legitimate king of England, she begins to search for his remains, which, according to tradition, were thrown into a river after he lost his kingdom and his life in the decisive Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
The trigger for Philippa’s Richardomania is, paradoxically, a performance of Shakespeare’s play “Richard III.” Before, the king was at best a name to them. And of course neither Stephen Frears’ film nor the book on which it is based would ever have existed if the real-life Philippa Langley hadn’t tracked down the skeleton of Richard, who thanks to Shakespeare was one of the most famous English kings, in 2012 under the concrete welfare office parking lot in the central British city of Leicester but some lesser-known monarch of the Middle Ages. The headlines that this discovery made around the world were due to Shakespeare – not to Richard’s relatively short reign at the end of the Wars of the Roses.
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It is at least contradictory that Philippa and the other members of the “Richard III. Society” (which is dismissed as “the fan club” by a particularly unpleasantly conceited professional historian in the film) on the one hand constantly emphasize how little their king has in common with Shakespeare’s portrayal, but on the other hand he Philippa in the form of the actor (Harry Lloyd). who portrayed him in the theater performance appears. But the chemistry that arises between the office worker with Fatique Syndrome, separated mother of two children, and the young, charismatic king creates a strange poetry that eliminates questions about such contradictions.
The final battle: Philippa says goodbye to Richard
Source: Graeme Hunter/X RENTAL
And that also elevates the film beyond the status of a comedy about an outsider who challenges and defeats the establishment, set in real, everyday, rainy and not always beautiful Britain. Because of course none of the university officials with their slide rules and the professors with the thick books believe her at first. People ignore the evidence they have gathered from sources that Richard was buried in a monastery church in Leicester that was demolished after the Reformation, but whose grounds were never built over due to fear of religious taboos. And one really scoffs at your feeling that you say exactly where Richard’s bones lie under today’s parking lot.
The only person who believes her is the head of Leicester City Council. “The Lost King” therefore has a feminist message. But that doesn’t bother. Because the film works on at least five levels even without a message: as an old-fashioned, typically British comedy in the best sense, as a drama of self-discovery by an outsider, as a minimally romantic love film about a separated older couple who get back together (Philippa’s husband, who supports her despite all skepticism). played with fine ironic understatement by Steve Coogan) and as an example of the genre of British archaeological drama – the millions of people who liked the 2022 Netflix film “The Excavation” about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship, in contrast to hundreds of thousands of film critics, may also enjoy “The Lost King”.
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And last but not least, the film is essentially a whodunnit, that is, this very British crime thriller type in which detectives use a mixture of combinatorics and intuition to gather clues until, at the end, they come to a brilliant conclusion to the astonishment of the audience. Philippa Langley is a younger and more modern Miss Marple, and the crime she solves is the long-standing lie peddled by the Tudors and their willing poetic enforcer William Shakespeare about Richard’s life and death.
However, the excavation confirmed a very important Shakespearean detail: Richard, who is portrayed as a hunchback in the drama, actually had an extreme curvature of the spine. Of all things, this physical feature, which was also supposedly made up for propaganda purposes, gives the film its big dramatic climax when a skeleton appears in a hole full of rain-soaked mud in Leicester and everyone immediately sees that it is actually Richard’s bones.
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