Queen Victoria strikes up a very unlikely friendship with Indian clerk named Abdul Karim, causing many problems for the household.
The story sees Abdul Karim and Mohammed taken from India across to England to present Queen Victoria with a coin. From that the friendship stems as Adbul doesn’t exactly follow the correct protocol when in the presence of the Queen. She is rather taken with the young man as well though and it does create a rather easy to watch film. Sometimes you just need a film like this, although I guess it does highlight some major issues that were the norm back in the late 1800s.
Judi Dench is obviously as outstanding as always and the build up to eventually seeing her face and the start of her performance is well built up and creates such a suspense. I think we have reached the point though where we are just expecting a good performance from Dame Judi and we get that in this film. Credit does have to go to Ali Fazal as well though as he is brilliant as Abdul and they work so well together, that was obviously very important to have the main two with such strong performances. I was also rather surprised to see Eddie Izzard as I had no idea he was in the film, I thought he put in a rather impressive performance in his supporting role as well, just felt like that was well worth mentioning.
I actually found this to be a rather and nice and well lovely film to watch when I wasn’t really fancying the current horror/thriller films that the cinema seems to be full of, plus this one probably won’t really be around for very long either, this type of film never really seems to have a long cinema release.
I think the main problem with the film could be that nothing is really based on facts, which is mentioned at the start of the film and that does put you in a rather strange mindset when watching it. Is any of it actually true or have they totally made all of it up, in terms of the friendship, was he in fact just a servant that was brought over in an attempt to improve the relations with India?
Nevertheless I was engaged throughout the film and throughly enjoyed it for what it was. I have always been pretty fascinated with with Royal Family and love watching films and TV series (The Crown, I am talking about you) even if they are partly made up and just based on a small truth. I have always be just so interested in that, especially about the great Queen’s we have had in Britain. It seems to work well as a film and this one is no different at all, I just hope that it does find an audience as it would be such a shame if it goes by so unnoticed. Probably came out at a rather difficult time, as people will pick those horrors and action films, but if you want something a little easier to watch then I recommend Victoria & Abdul.
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