Like the House of Representatives in the United States, the scintillating series The Crown Netflix rotates its entire staff every two years.
Posted at 7:03 p.m.
The fifth chapter of this sumptuous and sulphurous saga, online since Wednesday, brings to Buckingham Palace a new Princess Diana (moving Elizabeth Debicki), a new Charles (Dominic West, alias Detective McNulty in TheWire) and a new Queen Elizabeth II, now played by Imelda Staunton (the cruel Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter), who succeeds the imperial Olivia Colman, who succeeded the luminous Claire Foy. Are you still following? Great.
A tick under the fourth season which was phenomenal, the fifth delivery of The Crownwhich covers the tumultuous period of the Windsors between the summer of 1991 and the beginning of 1997, turns out to be more salacious, sensationalist and less harmonious than the preceding ones.
On the other hand, a weaker season of The Crown remains an entertainment of royal quality, in front of which it is almost necessary to make the reverence. It’s prestige TV crafted with keen attention to detail, excluding a few factual liberties taken by screenwriter Peter Morgan. We will come back to this later.
This grating and dark opus revives many humiliating scandals for the crown, including the famous tampongate, which fed the tabloids of the time. This is why monarchists have tightened their pearl necklaces even before the release of the episodes. What a lack of respect for the royal family, two months after the death of Elizabeth II, they cried in the British newspapers.
In Quebec, no one will be indignant that this series curries rich, privileged characters disconnected from reality, who live in an inaccessible golden bubble. And the tampongate ? ask yourself emphatically. It takes place in the fifth episode. The transcript of a private call between Prince Charles and his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) leaked in a cabbage leaf, in January 1993. Charles is heard cooing that he would like to be reincarnated as a tampon – a Tampax, he clarifies – so he can live inside his Camilla. International shame, what.
The Crown 5 also devotes a full episode to theannus horribilis of Queen Elizabeth II in 1992. Fire at Windsor Castle, separation of Charles and Diana, rupture between Prince Andrew and Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson (the Duchess of York), as well as the divorce of Princess Anne and her remarriage fast did not spare the sovereign, trained in a military fashion to keep up appearances and maintain decorum.
Deconstructed, this season does not unfold 100% linearly and includes loopy episodes, which emerge from the lesser known parts of life of these dysfunctional aristocrats. The captivating third hour focuses entirely on the rise of the Egyptian Al-Fayed family, whose son, Dodi Al-Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), also perished in the car crash that killed Princess Diana in August 1997.
PHOTO FROM THE SERIES, PROVIDED BY NETFLIX
Dodi Al-Fayed is played by Khalid Abdalla
Discloser: the fatal sequence at the Alma bridge, in Paris, will only appear in the sixth and final season of The Crown.
Now, how did the Al-Fayeds, who have no blue blood, rise through the ranks of this ultra-rigid society closed to foreigners? That’s fascinating. Father Mohamed (Salim Daw) buys first the Ritz in Paris, then the luxurious Harrod’s store in London, and even finances the feature film chariots of firewinner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1982.
Despite appearances by Boris Yeltsin, Tony Blair and Conservative Prime Minister John Major, The Crown moves further away from traditional geopolitical issues to devote itself to intimate dramas. Obviously, Diana and Charles eclipse the Queen and Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce, the High Sparrow in Game Of Thrones) with their infidelities, their controversial interviews and the open war they lead to win the battle of public opinion. The second episode details the secret creation of the famous book by Andrew Morton (Andrew Steele), to which Diana Spencer contributed secretly and on tape. Two episodes (7 and 8) also dig into the explosive interview given by the Princess of Hearts to BBC journalist Martin Bashir (Prasanna Puwanarajah) in November 1995.
The first episode is more like the first editions of The Crownwhile the royal yacht, the famous Britanniabegins to take on water, as does the adrift monarchy, which citizens deem outdated and costly, while the country is going through a difficult recession.
For the first time in five seasons of The Crown, Netflix has added a disclaimer that states that this is a work of fiction based on real events. Thank you for the precision, but we suspected it. The background of the story told by The Crown is right. The more poignant elements have been fictionalized or altered to accommodate the structure and dramatic curve of a television series. It seems obvious to me.
Another point of contention in The Crown 5 concerns the special relationship that Prince Philip had with Penny Knatchbull (Natasha McElhone). Penny was 30 years younger than Philip and had married his godson, Norton Knatchbull. Screenwriter Peter Morgan suggests that Philip and his confidante Penny were lovers, although this information has never been officially confirmed.
Is this detail worth climbing the heavy drapes of Kensington Palace? As they say at Balmoral, oh, bloody hell, no!