David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike are two very handsome and watchable leads in a true life story of forbidden love
Britain’s dark colonial past is dragged out into the burning sunlight in this rousing true-life love story from Amma Asante, the director of Belle. When an African prince falls in love with a white English office girl in post-war London, their marriage causes political and tribal trauma in their respective countries.
Prince Seretse Khama (a dignified David Oyelowo in a role not unlike his Martin Luther King in Selma) of Bechuanaland (then a British protectorate and now Botswana) meets Ruth Williams (played with understatement by Rosamund Pike) at a Missionary Society dance in 1947. After a whirlwind and touchingly portrayed romance, they marry and return to his homeland to take up their roles as future king and queen.
However not only do their respective families (including Nicholas Lyndhurst as Ruth's racist dad) reject the idea but establishment figures in both the fast-fading British Empire and tribal elders in Bechuanaland have grave reservations about the union for very different reasons as well. Inter-racial marriage may still have been taboo in the Britain of the forties but Prime Minister Clement Attlee is more concerned that Apartheid South Africa may be so affronted by this racial impurity that they will leave the Commonwealth and thus deny the Empire its gold and mineral rights.
Seretse and Ruth also have to contend with the seething resentment and anger from the people of Bechuanaland, who are furious that the scion of their own royal family would marry outside his own people and race. Meanwhile. the white community will not accept Ruth either.
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Rosamund Pike talks to RTÉ Entertainment
This is very much a true story and it reveals once again the intense racism and bigotry of the day as well as the desperation of British ruling classes as the sun finally sets on the empire. As the Whitehall mandarins who conspire to keep the couple apart, Jack Davenport and Tom Felton are a toxic cocktail of patronage and spineless manipulation and a young Anthony Wedgewood Benn seems to be the only MP on Seretse and Ruth's side.
The sneering colonial classes do their best to keep the couple apart
Worthiness doesn’t get in the way of a great yarn and Asante, who shot the movie in the original locations where these events took place, tells the story with a well-judged mix of humour, giddy love, and painful reality.
She juggles the political skulduggery, the lives of the infinitely more humane tribes people, and the greater backdrop of Africa’s slow and painful march to independence with real understatement and class.
Alan Corr @corralan
