Fire­brand – first-look review

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.