Sweeping romantic drama
True-life story of mixed-race Bamangwato royal marriage
(7) A UNITED KINGDOM: Directed by: Amma Asante. Starring: David Oyelowo, Rosamund Pike, Terry Pheto, Jack Davenport, Tom Felton, Abena Ayivor and Vusi Kunene. Showing at: The Bridge. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin.
THE new film from Amma Asante retells a true-if-streamlined story which took place simultaneously in the corridors of Westminster and the country now known as Botswana just over than half a century ago.
But while it navigates lots of period-appropriate big issues – mixed-race marriages, the decline of the British Empire, how to look fabulous in a tea dress or three-piece suit when it’s almost 40°C in the shade – it’s fundamentally about the ways in which private attitudes shape a nation’s collective heart and soul, and, as such, it’s very much a film for the Brexit-riven present.
As she did in her gorgeous Austenesque period drama Belle (2013), Asante uses a quintessentially British storytelling style here – a romantic melodrama that breaches class boundaries – to interrogate ideas of British identity, and specifically the underacknowledged role of blackness within it.
A United Kingdom is about the romance between Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), an insurance clerk from an emphatically ordinary background, and Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), a nice chap she meets at a London Missionary Society dance, who happens to be heir to the throne of the Bamangwato people of Bechuanaland, a protectorate that has been under British rule since the 1880s.
After a year-long courtship, the couple marry in 1948, which makes Ruth the Queen of Bechuanalandin-waiting.
But this triggers immediate and severe diplomatic fallout: 1948 was the year in which South Africa, which bordered Bechuanaland to the south, first drank deep of the poison of apartheid.
But there is also uncertainty in Bechuanaland itself, where the idea of a white woman as the nation’s symbolic mother-figure, while the country continues to be buffeted and prodded by its British minders, isn’t an immediately appealing one.
Jack Davenport plays Sir Alistair Canning, a reptilian (and fictional) civil servant who protests the union on behalf of political expediency in the main, though bigotry is an unmissable factor too.
Tom Felton plays his even weaslier civil service sidekick.
When Ruth tells him she won’t back out of the engagement, Guy Hibbert’s script gives Davenport a nicely ambiguous hiss of “Have you no decency?”, an attitude the couple hear spelt out less vaguely by drunks on the street – and also, more affectingly, by Ruth’s own father (Nicholas Lyndhurst).
To him, Bechuanaland is as foreign as a foreign country can get. Asante neatly draws out the visual contrast between her two settings: the first part of the film takes place in London, mostly in the misty, grey-blue dark, but when the film moves to Africa it fills with previously unglimpsed ochres, umbers and flashes of pink and green – plus endless horizons.
Much of the film’s appeal lies in watching a loving couple look out for each other while forces around them conspire to make life as tough as possible and later, in the film’s broader and heavier-footed second half, actively wrench them apart.
Pike and Oyelowo have a hearty, whole-meal chemistry together and play their small moments with sincerity and a light elegance.
When Ruth learns her husband is forbidden from consuming alcohol in his own country, she unfussily switches her drink order from a gin and lime to lemonade – and Oyelowo, who elsewhere re-airs the composure under pressure that made his Martin Luther King in Selma so quietly blistering, momentarily looks like a man crumpled by kindness.
The Westminster machination scenes are less subtle, to the point that the film asks you to take a little too much as read: it’s never entirely clear, for example, why Winston Churchill (who never appears on screen) championed Seretse’s case in opposition but dramatically changed his tune after the 1951 general election.
Clement Attlee is shown to be a hand-wringer and a compromiser, while Tony Benn (Jack Lowden) pops up now and again as the Left’s conscience.
It’s less finely wrought than Belle, but stirring, heartstring-strumming stuff nonetheless – a chapter of history that rewards a close reading. – The Telegraph