Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.“Divorced, beheaded, died.” So begins the grisly rhyme with which British schoolchildren once memorised the fates of the six wives of Henry VIII. A modern tweak may now be required for final spouse Catherine Parr — now destined to become the subject of mixed-bag historical drama Firebrand. Alicia Vikander plays the queen, and if that old classroom précis ends in a spoiler, the movie packs enough fictionalised surprises to give the average Tudor historian a turn.We open in 1544. Henry is away fighting in France, Catherine an astute regent and England under her fleeting rule as idyllic as it could be given the plague. Yet the good times cannot endure the return of her husband. A shameless scene-stealer, convinced of his personal blessing by God, for some reason he is played by Jude Law. The king spends the rest of the film in various loud moods, propped up on a ruinous bad leg. Director Karim Aïnouz builds several set pieces around the dressing of ulcers. If they don’t widen the eyes, the sex scenes will.Outside the bedchamber, it isn’t always easy to avoid recalling BBC children’s series Horrible Histories. Several beards look vulnerable to being yanked from actors’ chins. But the script can also be impressive in marrying historical detail and human drama. The children of Henry’s previous wives are at once royal heirs and victims of their father’s whims and rages. (The young Elizabeth scowls, as you’d imagine, at the man who executed her mother.) And Henry’s psyche is brightly imagined: an ego vast enough to make law the divine right of kings, and still, in the end, gnawingly needy. That outsize shadow is hard to escape. The film is appalled by the bellowing and bullying, but also fascinated by it. By contrast, Catherine is an ethical Machiavel, wrangling the king to noble ends. But the movie is vague about what those are, and oddly brisk about her groundbreaking role as a published woman writer.Centuries into the future in Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, Vikander also subverted a tyrant. There, however, the villain was a tech mogul, and her enigmatic edge made sense because she was a cyborg. In Firebrand, she is simply nudged into becoming a supporting part in her own story.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from September 6
