Philippa Langley, a modest employee bullied by her boss in Edinburgh, is almost depressed. One evening, when she attends a performance of the tragedy at the theater “Richard III” de Shakespeare, something clicked inside her: what if this much-maligned monarch was not this caricature of a traitorous traitor conveyed by official history? One thing leading to another, this mother will discover amateur historian skillsand embark on a mad quest: to locate the remains of Richard III, which has never been found…
On paper, it’s hard to see how to make a film regarding the desire of a middle class woman wanting to rehabilitate a king who died in the 15th century. This is without counting the combined talents of Steve Coogan and Stephen Frears. The first, with his writing accomplice Jeff Pope (already author of “Philomena” and the excellent “Stan and Ollie”), and thanks to the actress Sally Hawkins (“The shape of water”), paints the portrait of a frustrated Philippa Langley in her professional life and who will find in this historical research a way of asserting her convictions and her feminine intuitions in the face of sexism and the condescension of her interlocutors. The second has no equal in telling a story with tremendous fluidity, without ever boring the viewer, and always keeping a gift for the wink and irony.
“The lost king” is certainly not a “great” film by Stephen Frears, it is neither “Tamara Drewe” nor “Philomena”, but it is a new portrait of a woman looking at herself with pleasure.
