The crown has two ends. And no, it’s not like I’m a family doctor. Netflix split the final season into two parts (the first, released on Thursday, November 16th, the second, on December 14th), and what gives this decision meaning is just that: giving the series two endings. This is what she deserved and what the public wanted. Because one is the long-awaited ending that everyone has been wondering about for seven years, ever since the platform premiered the series on November 4, 2016, which was set back in 1947, 50 years before the point it reaches now is. Will Diana die? the world wondered. At first it seemed yes, then no, finally the original plan was resumed: the series would last until very soon. Diana included. The four chapters of the first part close this mystery. The other ending is that of the series itself, which will be released in December with six more episodes. This ending is exactly as expected, but it’s more open-ended. Its previews show that the film looks to the future: Guillermo is the protagonist. Like in reality. And that is at once the challenge, the problem and the achievement of “The Crown”: it is so closely tied to our lives, to what we know, that it is very difficult to see it as the fiction that it is .
Elizabeth Debicki as Diana and Dominic West as Charles in the fifth season of “The Crown.”
The narrative of all these years, the ceaseless repetition of the Greek tragedy of Diana of Wales, resonates in our minds sequence after sequence, shot after shot. And that means that the morbidity is served, with all the elegance of a detailed and very good British blockbuster, but morbid. And that’s why sometimes we see the series almost like a documentary and sometimes like a TV movie. Generally expectant. This will be the last time Diana sees her children, we think, as if we were seeing it in a crystal ball. This will be your last dinner. This is his last car ride. We know the fate of its protagonists, or rather their misfortune. As always, it’s the details that win in the series. The ones we don’t know if they are real or part of a fiction that becomes a new reality, another version of events. Diana wearing a hat from the Canary Islands eats vanilla ice cream. Diana wraps a paper gift with the Eiffel Tower, a console for her son Enrique, who turns 13 two weeks later. Diana rejects the ring and marriage proposal from Dodi Al Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) to Mohamed Al Fayed, the young man’s father, without ever knowing the outcome of the couple.
Diana, Diana, Diana. The royal family is secondary; Andrés and Eduardo, the youngest children of Isabel II, do not appear at all, Camila only in a few scenes. With Her Majesty’s permission, Diana is the true queen of this part of the season. Isabel II is portrayed in these chapters in her coldest, even unkindest version, until she redeems herself at the last moment. A redemption that we of course know; It’s in the history books – and on the BBC. The Duke of Edinburgh doesn’t have much sense either. Young Guillermo and Enrique, sullen as teenagers, reflect the summer joy they previously experienced with their mother, which serves even more as a counterbalance to seeing her sunk in sadness. “They don’t cry for her, they cry for you,” Philip of Edinburgh whispers to William as they follow his mother’s coffin on foot in a London engulfed in sadness.
The Al Fayeds’ notoriety is similar to that of 1997: much that summer when Dodi and Diana went out together; Shortly after her death in Paris, the princess logically made headlines. The most striking figure is the father, the tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed (Salim Daw), who was the owner of the Harrods department store or the Ritz Hotel in Paris and is portrayed as a lovemaking strategist, with Dodi as a puppet at his side. Commands. That’s the beauty of The Crown: that we’ll never know what reality was like, how twisted it is; that no one is completely good or evil, that there are infinite shades of gray in people and in stories. This becomes even more true as time passes and the voices become quieter. Mohamed Al Fayed died on August 30, exactly 26 years, minus one day, after his son.
Fflyn Edwards as Prince Harry (left) and Rufus Kampa as William, alongside Elizabeth Debicki as Diana in “The Crown”.
In the fourth season, Charles and Diana’s wedding was recreated (without showing it on screen). The fifth, her divorce, with an increasing role for the princess. The sixth should focus more and more on Lady Di, but in these four episodes she is the absolute protagonist; so much so that she even appears dead. The Australian Elizabeth Debicki is fascinating in her role, even more relaxed. She’s so much like the Princess of Wales, with her blue swimsuit on the bow of a boat, with her Dior bags and her Versace glasses, with her vest walking among the landmines, that it’s even disturbing. Once again, reality and fiction intersect, unleashing the morbidity of learning the end of the princess.
The viewer suffers with her the paparazzi chases, which become just as tiring, disturbing and oppressive as they were for Diana in real life. The idea of an escape, a possible departure to California, which skims over in the series, whether reality or not, ends up exactly in this dreamed place 25 years later with the departure of Diana’s youngest son Enrique and his wife and children. , fleeing the same media harassment. This also reflects what the Queen says in the first chapter, where Diana is outside the royal family and Tony Blair tries to take advantage of her image: that you are either with the Windsors or you are not, no half measures. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will also be familiar with this story.
Subtle homage
When season five premiered last fall, Elizabeth II had just died. In fact, the sixth film was just being shot and filming was paused for a few days as a sign of mourning. And this time a small tribute to the sovereign has arrived, in a subtle but obvious way, as at the beginning of the second chapter a photographer close to her praises her as the glue that united a British society that, like so many other moments of deep division: “I think we’ll miss her a lot when she’s gone.”
What can the crown give us that we don’t yet know? A plot that is perhaps not different, but full of details, which, as always in its narrative, takes place on the higher level between fiction and reality. We won’t know if that happened, if that private conversation happened, if it was similar. We won’t know if that person cried, if that hug existed. We want to know and believe. But we won’t be able to: its only protagonists are no longer there, and the series plays with the advantage that those left behind will never comment on the matter. The truth, the morbidity, the ulterior motives, everything is mixed. But the Crown version remains.
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