18C on Film: A Royal Affair (2012)

I finally got around to watching the Danish film A Royal Affair, which came out in 2012 and has been streaming on Netflix for a while. It tells the story of King Christian VII of Denmark, his English bride (Caroline Matilda, sister to George III, of England), her illicit affair with Christian’s personal physician Johann Struensee, as well as the struggle over bringing Enlightenment ideas to eighteenth-century Denmark.

The official English-language movie poster.

Knowing pretty much nothing about Denmark in the eighteenth century, I found the film fascinating from a cultural and historical perspective. After the film, I did a little online fact-checking, and, for the most part, the general outline of events as presented in the film is more or less accurate. The costumes, wigs, sets and props are very reminiscent of The Duchess, and, hence, gorgeous and historically-accurate. Though a little on the long side, the film keeps viewers’ attention through excellent performances by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who played the English & Danish-speaking Queen Caroline, and Danish actors Mikkel Følsgaard & Mads Mikkelsen who played the King and his cheating physician, respectively.

Just one of Queen Caroline's many many gorgeous gowns in the film.

In many ways, the film is typical of the type. It depicts an unhappy arranged marriage, a woman who must endure her husband’s attentions in bed until she is pregnant with an heir, and an illicit affair that, we know, can only end badly. Similar tropes abound in Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and the British film The Duchess (2008) to name just a few more recent examples.

What makes A Royal Affair different, aside from its being in Danish and set in Denmark, is the film’s perspective on the Enlightenment ideals that royal physician Streunsee and the Queen espoused and attempted to bring to Denmark. The conditions in the country, including abuse of peasants and serfdom, surface frequently in the film, and conversations between characters often reference the ideas of French philosophes such as Rousseau and Voltaire. The notion of personal freedom is explored in a larger context, going beyond just the implications for the upper classes, whose freedoms are examined in similar films.

The fight for personal and political freedoms becomes increasingly fraught in the film as the Queen and Struensee become entangled in a love affair while manipulating the King, whose unnamed mental illness renders him at times quite child-like, in order to implement new laws. The laws are ones that we recognize as the pillars of free society: banning censorship, banning torture, banning excessive work weeks for peasants. How can we not admire these laws? But the film depicts how Struensee, in his idealistic desire to implement these laws, ends up manipulating the King—his ostensible friend—in the same ways that the conservatives on the other side did previously.

The film makes it clear that eventually Struensee is just another courtier
waiting to manipulate the King.

Thus, the film refuses to demonize or idealize any of the characters completely while demonstrating the entrenched ideas of the times and the radical quality of notions that we in the Western world often take for granted. The film ends with the Queen’s loyal servant delivering her account of the past events to her children after the Queen’s death. Caroline’s final exhortation to her children, that a better future is in their hands and that a new dawn is finally breaking in Denmark, has modern reverberations as well. In many ways, the film is just as much about our own time as it is about the eighteenth century.

For those of us interested in issues of performance, the film has a lot to say about that as well. Struensee and the King first bond over their mutual love of Shakespeare and, later, Struensee encourages Christian to speak up in council meetings by comparing them to putting on a performance or acting on stage. A masquerade scene, practically requisite in an eighteenth-century costume picture, serves to remind audiences that characters wear masks even without an actual mask to wear. Several scenes take place at the theater and Shakespearean plays, especially Hamlet, are not only enjoyable inside jokes in the film, but also further illustrate the performative nature of good and evil.