After the film Spencer, I had a cheesy veggie burger and a greasy bag of chips. Days later, I realised that was the point of the film, because in the last scene, at a drive-through chipper, the lead character places her order of fast-food. ‘What’s the name,’ the chipper voice asks. ‘Spencer,’ she replies, hence the film’s title.
Spencer is Princess Diana, former Princess of Wales. Spencer, the film is not the telling of the true Diana story according to its Chilean director Pablo Larraín who describes it as “a fable from a true tragedy.” A fable means a story that is not true, or a story in which animals speak like people to teach the people a lesson.
Animals don’t speak in Spencer. However, Princess Diana likens herself to a pheasant, an ornamental bird of many colours that is silly as she stays around to be shot. Images of pheasants abound as metaphors in the film which I’d describe as a surreal psychodrama. Diana’s many gowns are labelled “PoW” Princess of Wales or… Prisoner of War. And that’s the story really, the story of a princess who is a prisoner of war.
Prison images are ubiquitous. There’s barbed wire, food delivered by military convoy, abundance of security personnel – lots of reminders that the princess is a watched woman. Cinematographer Claire Mathon captures superbly the claustrophobia in luxuria that traps the princess in a web of royal rituals which strip her of agency and identity. At the start, Diana, (Kristen Stewart) is geographically lost a metaphor for psychologically. She speaks in a strangulated hushed voice. She vomits the gorgeous food into the toilet. She cuts herself with a pliers.
You are free to do what we tell you to do. The film plays out in luxury Sandringham over three excruciating days, Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, excruciating to Diana in the fading days of her marriage to Charles. The score by Jonny Greenwood amplifies the excruciation, a sort of baroque string quartet to the abyss, but Diana’s not for dying just yet.
With the pliers, she cuts the curtains which were sewed together to prevent the sharp lenses of the paparazzi from photographing her undressing – she’s told – but perhaps to prevent her from looking out. She cuts the barbed wire to gain access to her abandoned childhood home, eerily shrouded in moonlight and mist. She cuts the necklace her husband Prince Charles has presented her for Christmas, probably because he’s presented a better necklace to the other woman and also, it’s the neck is where they behead you. A point made by the appearance of Ann Boleyn, neither ghastly nor ghostly, but appearing naturally. What happens to the pheasant after she’s shot, Diana asks the chef?
As the possibility of escape looms, the film lightens. There’s an ecstatic montage in which she dances her way through the chapters of her life, ballet and bops breaking into a running canter. And on the third day, humoured by her personal dresser Maggie, Diana rushes to the royal pheasant shoot and glides out in front of the crowd of shooters, mimicking the movement of birds. She tells Charles she’s taking the kids to London, and Charles hesitatingly lets her. As they fly away, she and her boys hear and happily sing along with “All I Need Is a Miracle” by Mike & the Mechanics.
The film ends with Diana, ordering fast food, no permission needed, just a mother and kids having the craving for fast-food and acting on it. A kind of freedom indeed!
