Based on the novel by Casey McQuiston (which, admittedly, I haven’t read), Red, White & Royal Blue came frolicking onto our Netflix screens on the 11th of August and, my goodness, it’s good to have it there.
Alex Claremont-Diaz, son of the US president, and Prince Henry, son of the heir to the British throne, have a longstanding animosity towards one another. After a cake-related international incident, the two are forced by their families to act like they are bezzie mates in front of the media in order to ensure, oh, I don’t know, trade relations or world peace or something.
Will the enforced proximity to one another change their relationship? Will enemies turn into friends, and friends turn into lovers? Of course, they will. That’s what the whole story is about.
It’s a straightforward, honest-to-goodness generic romance. This is something that makes my heart sing. Romance novels outsell every other genre by approximately a billion per cent (I haven’t actually confirmed that statistic) and are horribly underrepresented on film. Let’s have more of this sort of thing!
The two leads, Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, are charming, fun and very, very pretty. As an almost fifty-year-old woman, it felt a bit pervy being so romantically invested in the love life of two such younglings. I told myself it was OK because I didn’t want to fuck either of them. I just really, really wanted them to fuck each other. And that’s not pervy at all.
The depiction of British royals is barmy and all the more fun for it. Depictions of my country by Americans have a very special charm.
Why on earth did McQuiston make the baffling decision to name most of her royal characters after actual living breathing members of the current royal family? There’s the second-born son of the heir to the throne called Henry. Which is, you know, exactly the same name as the actual second son of the guy who was heir to the throne when he was born. I know everyone knows the IRL one as Harry, but he is still called Henry. That’s his actual name. Couldn’t she think of any others?
Evidently not, given that the fictional Prince Henry’s sister is called Beatrice, the same as Harry’s cousin. Beatrice isn’t even a traditional royal name! Then there’s Prince Phillip, although this is the fictional firstborn’s name rather than the monarch’s spouse. Or possibly he’s named after the prince in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.
Not that Red, White & Royal Blue’s royal family are a carbon copy of our own. McQuiston has flipped the genders of Prince Henry’s parents (his now-deceased father married into royalty) and the reigning monarch. Because of course, Red, White, and Royal Blue isn’t set in the real world. It’s actually set in a world that is much better than the one we’re living in.
Take the president of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The president’s a woman! The Americans haven’t had one of those yet. The PM’s a black woman! Which is both novel and pretty cool.
Allowing for the fact that everyone is, of course, cooler and prettier than in real life, how realistic is the basic premise of the movie? How much of a big deal would it be if a member of the British royal family fell in love with the same-sex offspring of the American president?
Watching it, my initial reaction was that we, as a nation, would be cool with a gay royal. But, you know, I can only speak for myself here. I live in a country that voted ‘yes’ to Brexit and keeps re-electing the sodding Tory party, so my opinions are evidently not in sync with the majority of my fellow countrymen.
I can’t imagine many people in the 2020s would respond to an uncloseted public figure by declaring that homosexuality is a sin. Or that the whole being attached to your own sex business is morally abhorrent. But would most people be comfortable with it?
I’m thinking of the royal groupies who line the pavements at royal weddings waving flags and wearing homemade hats with union jacks and pictures of the royal couple on them. These people genuinely care about the royal family as if they were people they actually knew, rather than celebrities with a thousand-year backstory.
Would the royal-watchers still be there if we had a real-life Henry and Alex tying the knot in Windsor Castle? I honestly don’t know.
But as far as I can see, the most problematic part of the romance at the heart of Red, White & Royal Blue isn’t that the prince is dating a man, it’s that the prince is dating someone very closely involved in US politics.
The Royal family steer clear of politics. (They have to remain completely impartial. It’s probably a survival mechanism learned from seeing their predecessors getting done away with for political reasons.) Prince Henry tells Alex that he can’t vote. This isn’t strictly true. Everyone apart from the monarch is allowed to vote, but they choose not to.
Prince Henry joining the president on stage when she celebrates her re-election victory would certainly get a lot of people’s backs up. Including mine. Getting into bed (literally and figuratively) with the American Democratic party would be perceived as compromising the integrity of the royal’s traditional impartiality.
Still, you can’t help who you fall in love with, eh? Also, this movie is primarily made for Americans who’d probably see moving from British Royalty to American politics as a promotion.
And, yes, I do know that I’m overthinking a made-for-Netflix movie that makes Bridgerton look high-brow in comparison. But overthinking and nit-picking movies is what I do. It’s how I enjoy stuff.
Red, White & Royal Blue is, at heart, a very straightforward romance story that hits all the right notes. We have a couple of protagonists who are clearly perfect for one another but have a seemingly unsurmountable obstacle to surmount. They win through and presumably live happily ever after. I hope they do. They deserve it. Both Alex and the prince are very charming indeed.