The late Roger Michell’s final film has now been posthumously released. It is a blandly tasteful and celebratory BBC One-style documentary for the platinum jubilee, with a melancholy new relevance, as if we are entering a new “regency” age. Sad to say, it goes down like a cup of tepid, milky and over-sugared tea.
Michell’s previous cinema documentary, Nothing Like a Dame, about Britain’s brilliant theatrical dames, had been full of fun. This is merely reverent. There is no original material: the film is stitched together from existing footage, all of which is very familiar, but the found-footage approach (which Asif Kapadia used so intimately and vividly with Diego Maradona and Amy Winehouse) now looks like a retread. We go through the reign from its early days to her majesty’s situation now, finally going back for a sombre reflection on the death and funeral of George VI, presumably in acknowledgement of the fact that another sad event may unfortunately be on the way.
