The Young Victoria (2009)

The Young Victoria arrives dressed in its finest corsetry, a Julian Fellowes script guided by Jean-Marc Vallée, who was hired to drag the period drama away from the BBC and toward something with a pulse. Emily Blunt plays the teenage monarch as a creature of appetite and nerve, a girl who inherits an empire and immediately begins shoving the furniture around. The film's central preoccupation is her refusal to be managed. Her mother and the loathsome Sir John Conroy would have her sign away her authority. Her uncle Leopold would have her marry on his schedule. She does neither, or at least not on their terms.

Here the picture's progressive instincts are genuine and narrowly focused. Victoria's fight is against the men who treat her as an instrument, and the screenplay takes visible pleasure in her small rebellions: banishing Conroy, choosing her own household, proposing marriage herself when protocol forbids Albert from doing it. It is a portrait of female self-determination rendered in velvet and candlelight, and it lands with conviction. The camera does not need to announce its politics. The throne room does the talking.

Beyond that, the film keeps its cultural ambitions modest. Race, sexuality, class economics, the environment: none of these enter the drawing room. The one real liberty taken is dramatic, not ideological. Albert takes a bullet that history never gave him, a fabrication Fellowes defended as a means of showing devotion, and the resulting moment plays as pure cinema instead of argument. What remains is a handsome, well-mannered romance that flatters its heroine and its audience in equal measure, content to let a queen be difficult without ever asking why difficulty was necessary. It is pleasant company. It is not a manifesto.