The Queen of Spain

Trueba, 62, has reassembled a lot of the old cast, most of whom play characters trying to recapture old magic. Make of that what you will. It's fun.

Cruz carries the film. She has a ridiculous kind of heroism, and her disguises are hilarious, particularly as a knight, when she insists on wearing a false beard under her helmet.

When the film makes its hairpin turn from comedy to drama, it doesn’t really fully commit, which has the effect of negating the power of its more serious ideas.

One of the most unsettling things about Queen is how awkwardly it tackles all this painful, historical material: it’s as though Trueba’s script knows that homage must be paid to it, but it feels shoehorned in.

Sure it’s meant to be taken in good fun, but the energy keeps getting undercut by over-broad comedy and uninspired scenes, such as a limp musical number in the Isabella movie.

It might be fitting that a film about a film made under a censor-heavy regime is better to look at than engage with, but it also says much about the slight and stretched The Queen of Spain.

Fernando Trueba fails to probe the political implications of The Queen of Spain's period milieu, which is particularly confounding given the filmmaker’s evident anti-fascist sympathies.