Stiff Upper Lips Make a Talkie

"A New Era" is certainly better than the first "Downton Abbey" (2019) theatrical movie to continue the TV series, but that's not saying much. I hardly even remember what that one was about, and I quit the boob-tube show early on. The impression that remains, though, is that it was mostly a failure at cinematic transmutation. This continues to be largely the case here. The characters are uninteresting, the score is obnoxious, the snobbish soap opera melodramatics trite, and even the modern sensibilities to be anachronistically progressive on some social issues (in particular the homosexuality of one servant) only manages to somehow reinforce the show's conservatism, of a nostalgia for upstairs-downstairs class stratification--an oh look how good this aristocratic system is quality. It's peculiar enough that the United Kingdom continues with a semblance of its historical monarchial ways, but the Anglophilia for this stuff from foreigners is baffling.

"A New Era" even makes its film-within-a-film business an exercise in fetishizing the posh Queen's English of Upper Received Pronunciation while villainizing the Cockney tongue of an ill-mannered silent movie star who must be instructed by the good lil slavish poors how to behave and properly serve her betters as they make a talkie. What a bunch of rubbish. Film is shown to be a place where servants may dress as masters, where class distinctions dissolve--just not in this film. Sound recording was not that good in early talkies, either, no matter how refined the English dialect. Go watch the real film production unrestored (that is, unimproved) that "Downton Abbey" mines here for its plot, Alfred Hitchcock's "Blackmail" (1929), to hear that, or "The Terror" (1928), if it still existed, or any other film from the era. I don't mind the historical inaccuracy so much, nor that its goat-gland silent-to-talkie transition storyline is a cross between "Blackmail" and "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), but it does bug me that it's that way to support the picture's classism.

It's about time this troupe starts to learn how to make a proper movie, though. A few sweeping shots of the estate's exterior hardly cuts it. So, we get the filmmaking business, which continues to ground this at its architectural center, in a bifurcated narrative that splits the cast with the other half going on the generic sequel overseas trip. Unfortunately, this being Tory porn, that means it's going to the French Riviera for some "frog bashing." So, in addition to the accent bigotry, the other main narrative here revolves around the dreaded prospect that the aristocratic bloodline might be polluted by le Français. Sacré bleu!