The films that inspired the royal home movie

The embrace of cinematic tropes signals a shift in royal communications that a generation ago would have been unthinkable

Many of us remember when important statements from the Royal family were faxed direct to Fleet Street’s newsrooms – or, in exceptional circumstances, read aloud at the end of palace driveways for the cameras. This week, however, bore witness to a new mode of delivery: an impressionistic short film harking back to the glory days of Merchant Ivory.
Howards End, The Remains of the Day, A Room with a View: three elegant literary adaptations from the late 1980s and early 90s, whose refined surfaces masked the deep currents of feeling underneath. Well, to announce the news that the Princess of Wales had completed her chemotherapy, we essentially got a three-minute revival of the style in home movie form.
Twisting views of sunlight filtering through the forest canopy? Check. Gently swaying fields of golden crops? Check again. Then before you can say “EM Forster”, there’s a family picnic under a venerable oak tree’s commodious boughs, and a photogenic young upper-class couple sitting side by side on a log pile, silently contemplating the hand that fate has dealt.
Kate and William’s personal James Ivory is the London-based filmmaker Will Warr – a longtime collaborator with Brand Wales known to TikTok addicts as the face of the London-based foodie video series TopJaw.
The result is certainly harmonious and slick. But its embrace of cinematic tropes signals a shift in royal communications that a generation ago would have been unthinkable. The Wales’s video explicitly positions the family as the leads in a story which resonates emotionally with ordinary viewers, even if its protagonists hail from a more elevated social background.
Another strong influence: Terrence Malick, the impressionistic American auteur for whom handsome A-listers absent-mindedly running their hands through wheat at sunset has been a career-long preoccupation. Malick invented the trope himself in 1973’s Badlands, and it’s been homaged countless times since, in everything from Marie Antoinette and The Assassination of Jesse James to Henry Cavill’s first Superman stint in Man of Steel.
But it was immortalised by Ridley Scott in 2000’s Gladiator, with an extended shot of Russell Crowe’s fingers brushing through an expanse of flaxen stems. The image is a cliche now, but it remains a useful one, signalling tranquillity and contemplation, but also a grounded connection to the natural world. (See also the climactic shot of a butterfly taking off from Kate’s outstretched hand: how many takes did Warr need to nab that?)
Having woven this spell, the clip then niftily breaks it. There are cutaways to grainy Super-8-style footage of the Waleses at play, and a digital “outtake” of the children playfully examining the camera lens. The visual texture of both techniques are at odds with each other – warm versus cool, vintage versus modern. But their purpose is the same: to reassure viewers what we’re watching is natural family behaviour, rather than a confection.
That’s disingenuous, because the video is clearly the latter. But in the long and turbulent history of royal PR, it feels like a watershed moment. Seasoned watchers might also note that in terms of pure good taste, it leaves the output of Archewell Productions looking like an episode of Suits. Hollywood’s Meghan and Harry, the ball is in your court.