Firebrand – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Fire­brand – first-look review

24 May 2023

Words by Rafa Sales Ross

Woman in Tudor-style dress and jewellery, surrounded by other figures in a dark, ornate setting.
Woman in Tudor-style dress and jewellery, surrounded by other figures in a dark, ornate setting.
Karim Aïnouz’s Eng­lish lan­guage debut is a frus­trat­ing­ly but­toned-up take on the life of Hen­ry VII­I’s final wife, Cather­ine Parr.

When Cather­ine Parr mar­ried King Hen­ry VIII, Brazil was a young coun­try at 43. At that point, the Por­tuguese were still vig­or­ous­ly tear­ing at South Amer­i­can land and peo­ple alike, the vio­lent rip­ples of coloni­sa­tion writ­ing in blood the bleak ear­ly his­to­ry of the coun­try. Almost three cen­turies would go by until Brazil left its sub­par sta­tus as a colony to enter its short-lived monar­chy era, with the sev­en-year stint of the Por­tuguese crown a ris­i­ble attempt at estab­lish­ing the small Euro­pean coun­try as one of the great white colonisers. 

Despite a meek regency, Brazil – and great part of South Amer­i­ca – have long cul­ti­vat­ed a quizzi­cal obses­sion with the idea of monar­chy, with the Eng­lish crown top­ping the ranks of curios­i­ty. Just two years ago, Chilean direc­tor Pablo Lar­raín tapped into this strange cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non with Spencer, a film root­ed in the com­pas­sion offered by many Lati­nos to a woman shat­tered by pow­er struc­tures far too famil­iar to the colonised. 

With Fire­brand, Brazil­ian Karim Aïnouz becomes the lat­est South Amer­i­can direc­tor to find inspi­ra­tion in a woman unwill­ing to be tamed by the roy­al fam­i­ly. Gone with Diana, in with Parr (played here by Ali­cia Vikan­der), the wife to take the cov­et­ed sur­vived” spot in the famous his­tor­i­cal rhyme about Hen­ry VIII (Jude Law in the film) and his six brides: divorced, behead­ed, died, divorced, behead­ed, sur­vived. Try­ing his hand at peri­od dra­ma, Aïnouz explores the patch of time pre­ced­ing Hen­ry VIII’s death, when Catherine’s Protes­tant sym­pa­thies brought her dan­ger­ous­ly close to join­ing two of the King’s for­mer wives six feet under. 

Over two decades, Aïnouz has bent and mor­phed dif­fer­ent cin­e­mat­ic styles to craft nuanced stud­ies of the inner lives of his char­ac­ters, play­ing with the tech­ni­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of cin­e­ma as a fram­ing device. His curios­i­ty is defined by gen­tle­ness, his female char­ac­ters the main bene­fac­tors of the director’s kind gaze, strong women trapped with­in the tight con­fine­ments of patri­archy yet nev­er defined by it. It is no sur­prise, then, that the direc­tor found the inspi­ra­tion for his Eng­lish lan­guage debut in Parr’s story. 

What is sur­pris­ing is how lit­tle of Aïnouz’s nuanced sen­si­bil­i­ty is present in his newest, a film float­ing in the aim­less lim­bo of char­ac­ter­less. In its goal to adapt Eliz­a­beth Fremantle’s his­tor­i­cal nov­el Queen’s Gam­bit”, Fire­brand bypass­es the dra­mat­ic val­ue of nar­ra­tive film­mak­ing, sold as an ahis­tor­i­cal retelling of the lit­tle-dis­cussed life of Parr but ulti­mate­ly con­sist­ing of a lus­cious­ly tex­tured but frigid­ly told reen­act­ment that has lit­tle con­cern for prod­ding at the mak­ing and beliefs of the woman cred­it­ed here as the one respon­si­ble for ush­er­ing in a new era for England. 

With pus ooz­ing from his rot­ting leg and sweat drip­ping from his grotesque­ly depict­ed body, Law does away with the hand­some­ness that defined many of his great­est roles to embody the infa­mous King. He grunts and puffs, more crea­ture than man, screech­ing My leg!” in a man­ner rem­i­nis­cent of Borat yelling My wife!”. The pan­tomime nature of his per­for­mance amus­ing yet out of place. Next to Law, Vikander’s meek frame stands in con­trast to the grandios­i­ty of it all: her hus­band, palace, entourage and aspirations. 

It is in Vikan­der that Fire­brand finds rare moments of inspi­ra­tion, the actress framed by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Hélène Lou­vart with the del­i­ca­cy of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring”, her exis­tence lin­ger­ing pre­car­i­ous­ly between the poten­tial for great­ness and the heavy bur­den of eter­nal shame. Fire­brand lingers in this space, too, but sad­ly lands towards the lat­ter, with Aïnouz’s sig­na­ture artistry painful­ly numbed by the shack­les of the conventional. 

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.