London, 1979. The two most important women of the West are about to meet in a living room full of paintings and brocades. They were born in the same year: one in a royal palace, the unwitting heir of a great empire, the other in “a small street” where their father had a shop. The Queen smooths the folds of her indigo suit and subtly adjusts the flower pots, before welcoming the woman her subjects have chosen as prime minister. And beyond the Buckingham Palace gates, in an apartment in Earl’s Court, is another young woman about to wreak havoc on the monarchy. La Regina Elisabetta, Margaret Thatcher, Lady Diana: these three women are the absolute protagonists of the fourth season of The Crown, available November 15th on Netflix. Peter Morgan – Oscar-nominated screenwriter and brilliant author of the show – miraculously makes it through the previous three seasons. The new episodes are set in the decade of the Walkman and rampant neoliberalism: now more than ever the royal family must defend their traditions against the new that advances, while the world changes, protests, asks for new freedoms.
Diana (if there were any doubts) steals the show from everyone already from the trailer. Diana the kindergarten teacher chased by the paparazzi. Diana celebrating her engagement with her friends, toasting, with the ingenuity of her twenties, to the “end of worries”. Diana the goddess of the hunt in Balmoral. Diana who doesn’t know who to bow to first. Diana with roller skates in the corridors of the Palazzo. Diana receiving letters from all over the world and not even a phone call from Carlo. Diana that Dad likes so much, and therefore must be the right one. Diana going to lunch with her rival, and then sticks two fingers down her throat. Diana opening the fridge at night, and then sticks two fingers down her throat. Diana looking for some love in the house, but receives waves from the people waiting for her in the street. Diana very much loved in public, and ignored by her husband. The actress Emma Corrin he had a difficult challenge ahead of him, confronting his nostalgia for the princess. And he won it hands down. And then there’s him, Carlo. The first meeting between the two is one of those perfect scenes where everything that will come later is contained: he is there to see another, she is wearing the mask of a school play. Which in many ways will be what they will do for the rest of their years together: hide and escape. For two seasons the eternal heir to the throne has had the face of Josh O’Connor, impeccable in the gestures and in the cold detachment of Carlo, yet capable of making one feel a modicum of compassion (if not sympathy) for that introverted boy. Desperately seeking family approval, he finds himself moving from the shadow of his mother to that of a wife so resplendent that she obscures everyone: her sister-in-law, her husband, even the sovereign.
The beauty of this series lies in the fact that the viewer knows exactly how it will end, but never knows what is going to happen. We know that Carlo will marry Diana, that they will divorce, that then he will marry the other: yet for a moment, watching them dance on the dance floor, we hoped that things would go differently. And the series continues to jump between the news and the myth, between history and fairy tale, for ten new episodes that are a fresco with great attention to detail. The costumes, which seem to have come out of the tabloids, photography. The light, even. The Crown tiptoe into the rooms deprived of power, adding what we could not see to what we already knew: the looks, the silences, the broken hearts, the unexpected tenderness as well as the secret melancholies, up to depression and eating disorders.
In this fourth season he bursts onto the scene Margaret Thatcher (a very good one Gillian Anderson) detestable at the right point, the girl “born in a small street” but able to open a way where no other had succeeded, thanks to her “killer instinct” and generous amounts of hairspray. Then there is the other Margaret, the queen’s sister, condemned to always be the eternal second, overtaken even by her twenty-year-old nephew. Helena Bonham Carter she inherited one of the most complex and fascinating characters in the series, and the episodes that see her as the protagonist are the most human and the most poignant.
And squeezed in the middle is her, the Queen (the Oscar winner Olivia Colman). The sovereign, now sixty, must now defend the kingdom which he inherited from a world going in the opposite direction, from a relentless prime minister and even from his own children, with whom he must make an appointment to get a vague idea of their unhappiness and their bewilderment. We too, along with the Queen, begin to see the cracks in that magnificent, glorious anachronism that is monarchy. Modernity advances at a brisk pace: the IRA bombs fall very close to the royal family, a new war is being fought in the Falklands, three million unemployed people are pouring under the windows of the palace (even managing to enter) and theAustralia wants to cut the umbilical cord with the UK. He hates the monarchy but loves his young princess very much: Diana, the mad variable, the black swan. And when she throws herself around the Queen’s neck, in a moment of despair, even the imperturbable Elizabeth is touched by doubt: But is it not that she is right, that we have to change? But it’s only a moment, why the Crown ultimately prevails on the good faith of his staff, on Carlo’s wishes, on Diana’s unhappiness, on Margaret’s frustration. Even, sometimes, about what Elizabeth herself would like. In fact, the series is not called The Queen, ma The Crown: because it is the Crown that, to exist, must win. He must always win.
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