Who is popular today?

New movies feature key scenes of central female characters legging it down streets or through fields. Is cinema finally keeping pace with real life? There is a moment in Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s imagining of an ill-fated weekend at Sandringham for Diana, Princess of Wales (Kristen Stewart), when Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) tells his wife, “You have to be able to make your body do things you hate. For the good of the country.” Diana grips the edge of a billiards table as if trying to hold herself together; behind white knuckles, satin, and perfect hair, untapped rage is seething.Diana’s fight to contain herself – to remain statue-like, elegant, and prim – repeatedly threatens to boil over. When it does, she does not take Charles’s advice. Instead, she runs as if her life depends on it. In a surreal montage of her past and present selves, Larraín shows a 12-year-old Diana chasing her friends on the lawn, then at 17, flying past in a school uniform, and at 20, tripping on the hem of her wedding dress, but hurtling on regardless. She is wild, unrestrained, luminous, and free, and the sequence is one of the film’s most moving and exuberant moments – one that precipitates Diana’s decision to live on her own terms, not those of the royal family. Continue reading...