Word: mother
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...royal lockdown at Kensington Palace. "Even a palace can be a prison," she tells us. We're well acquainted with the downside of royalty, thanks to the current Windsors' chatty ex-in-laws, but Victoria isn't just whinging. She sleeps in a room with her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), has only her spaniel Dash for a playmate and isn't allowed to walk down stairs alone. Her governess, the Baroness Lehzen (Jeanette Hain), is the closest thing she has to a friend...
...Duchess and her "adviser" (in both boudoir and boardroom), the glowering Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), try to strong-arm Victoria into signing over her power to her mother, just in case King William dies before she turns 18. We want her to be Queen so she can finally say, "Off with his head." Conroy is the film's only outright villain, but he's not really much source of tension: once she's Queen, she's the boss. Nor are Lord M. or Lehzen, even though they try to manipulate the young Queen, because this is primarily a love...
...around him is likely to get hit with some sort of whiskey-soaked shrapnel. Indeed, alarm bells go off the minute we hear that the love interest he meets on the road, an aspiring journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), has a 4-year-old. (And she's a single mother, movie shorthand for Vulnerable with Babysitting Issues...
...once the option of abortion is no longer open to a woman, there is no other choice. The natural course of this situation runs inevitably toward childbirth and child-rearing (adoption, if it is an alternative, only becomes one much later; Child-rearing carried out by an adopted mother still occurs after the biological mother has undergone a long, difficult pregnancy...
...change and modernity. The 33 elegantly neoclassical dwellings were designed by a Paris-educated, Ottoman-Armenian architect as accommodation for military staff based in the nearby Dolmabahce Palace. Modern Turkey's founder and onetime army officer, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, lived for a time in No. 76 with his mother...