Firebrand: Alicia Vikander gives her finest performance yet in Karim Aïnouz’s Tudor drama
Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz makes his English-language feature debut with a distinctive period piece starring Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr, sixth and last wife of Henry VIII.
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We’re in the mid-1540s, the final years of the reign of Henry VIII, and Henry (Jude Law) has married his sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander). You’ll no doubt recall the schooldays recital: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” So here we have the final queen of the ailing monarch’s reign, and the inevitable question arises: just how does she survive?
After the titles, there appears on the screen: “History tells us a few things, largely about men and war. For the rest of humanity, we must draw our own – often wild – conclusions.” In the traditional movie narrative, we’re shown Henry the independent-minded, manly ruler, dismissing or executing his wives as the mood takes him. History reveals a rather different figure, nervous and indecisive, pushed this way and that by the turbulent religious disputes of his reign. With his previous wife, the Catholic Catherine Howard (executed at age 18 after less than two years as queen, and the subject of Ford Madox Ford’s undeservedly neglected trilogy of novels The Fifth Queen, 1906-08), Henry slid back almost into Catholicism. Now he’s rejoined the Protestant camp; but, to the alarm of Bishop Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale), the Queen may be quietly pushing him towards making the Church less rigid and intolerant.
When the movie opens Katherine is Queen Regent while Henry is away in France fighting another pointless war. We see her, escorted by brightly uniformed guards and a few female attendants, riding through the English countryside towards some woodland. When they reach the trees she dismounts and tells the soldiers, “You don’t go any further – women only.” Leaving the puzzled horsemen, she and her women proceed through the woods as we start to hear a distant female voice. This is Katherine’s childhood friend Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a feminist avant la lettre, preaching a fiery sermon to the women (plus a few men) around her. “We must rise up and take what is ours!” she tells them. “It is not for those above us to tell us what to do!” Katherine listens, intrigued.
Back at the palace she starts writing down her own thoughts, inspired by Anne – who, we learn, was imprisoned and executed for heresy. But her ideas have sown a seed in Katherine’s mind, and when Henry returns home, the gangrene in his legs exacerbated by a fall from his horse in battle, she starts quietly pushing him in the same direction. She also confides in her step-niece Elizabeth (Junia Rees), daughter of the executed Anne Boleyn and future queen.
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As the story progresses the skies grow steadily darker, the landscape lours (Hélène Louvart’s camera makes masterly use of the scenery in and around Haddon Hall in Derbyshire) and Dickon Hinchliffe’s score grows ever more menacing. Katherine’s friend Edward Seymour (Eddie Marsan), who is clearly attracted to her and may indeed, rather than the low-fertility Henry, be responsible for getting her pregnant, warns her to be very careful. When Bishop Gardiner reads some of her ‘heretical’ writings, the shadows start closing in and Katherine begins to wonder if she can escape.
Firebrand, the first English-language film by the Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz, isn’t a period film in any conventional sense. (Not for the first time, it takes a non-English director to give us a totally new take on our own history – cf Shekhar Kapur’s two Elizabeth movies with Cate Blanchett in 1998 and 2007.) In the Observer it’s been hailed as “a distinctly modern take on Tudor history”.
This has evidently disappointed some transatlantic critics, no doubt expecting pageants and gallantry. Following the film’s Cannes 2023 debut, one called it “a stuffy, plodding historical drama”, another deemed it “a bit of a slog”. IMDb, totally missing the point, even dedicated a page to its numerous ‘Anachronisms’, ‘Factual Errors’ and ‘Character Errors’.
But I reckon Alicia Vikander, who’s been becoming ever more skilled an actor since her first leading role in Testament of Youth (2013), gives her finest performance yet, and Jude Law’s Henry is a sheer tour de force. (Some people suggest he’s too young for the role, but in fact he’s near the age the king was when he died.) No, for me Firebrand is, so far, my film of the year.
► Firebrand is in UK cinemas 6 September.