A Royal Affair

There’s a certain red-state pleasure in watching a historical drama set in a country you don’t really care about. For instance: the lush but too leisurely A Royal Affair. Under its skirts and wigs and candle wax, the multinational production offers a lesson in the high-court skulduggery of Age of Enlightenment Denmark. Not necessarily a 100-percent accurate lesson — as though any such movie ever is — but one with the virtue of telling you things you’re 77 percent likely never to be asked about later.

If it comes up, though, and you can recall nothing beyond, say, the charismatic performances and cinematographer Rasmus Videbaek’s Arcadian landscapes and chilly interiors, you can just tell people the movie is about love and sacrifice. That sounds good, right?

The love is between Johann Friedrich Struensee and Queen Caroline Mathilde. Casino Royale bad guy Mads Mikkelsen, looming and smoldering, plays the former, a country doctor turned royal physician turned reformist regent. Alicia Vikander, about to be seen in the new Anna Karenina, plays the queen, sister of England’s King George III and token of a little old-school European dynasty. Her arranged marriage to raging nut job King Christian VII — played by Mikkel Boe Folsgaard as though fresh from watching Tom Hulce in Amadeus and Yosemite Sam in “Shishkabugs” (Hassenpfeffer!) — leads to, you know, a royal affair.

And the royal affair leads to the betrayals and sacrifices ensured by the mechanics of costume-drama romance, the kinds that don’t really send you scurrying to Wikipedia to confirm the timeline. Director Nikolaj Arcel, co-writing here with Rasmus Heisterberg, helped adapt the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and has brought to this movie a similar sense of expository obligation, with a side of easily spotted villainy. People and their roles in the story are explained and explained again, and this is the sort of high-gloss European art object that makes sure our heroes’ assignations include, in the afterglow, some “let’s modernize and liberalize the whole damn country” pillow talk.

Vikander manages fine what’s demanded of her lightly written character: milky beauty, growing up in public, feverish tragedy. There’s another, better movie somewhere, though, in a different affair. The best scenes follow Folsgaard and Mikkelsen through a kind of buddy-movie arc that’s more complex (dramatically and historically) than the obvious hot hetero love on display. Just a couple of wild and crazy guys who shouldn’t have let a girl — ew! — spoil their constitution-rewriting fun.