Living With the Tudors

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Audience Member "Living with the Tudors" is a documentary about the historical reconstructions (rather than "reenactments") that have been going on for many summers at a beautiful Tudor mansion called Kentwell, in Suffolk, England. In fact, the film is not about the reconstructions themselves: you will not learn much about Tudor history here, or even about the logistics or research that make such reconstructions possible. The film is about what kind of people it takes to get such projects going, what kind of people will spend day after day, summer after summer, dressed in period clothes, greeting visitors and telling them who their fictional selves are, and what their craft consists in. Having selected less than a dozen salient characters among the several hundred that are involved in the reconstructions, directors Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, themselves young veterans of Kentwell, are curious about their motivations and whatever interesting stuff they may have to say about themselves, how they relate to Kentwell and who they are "in real life." The tone of the documentary is often ironical, as you see for instance the reenactors answering the same questions over and over again in the same words, and learn from the recreators themselves that they cannot be absolutely "authentic" but merely try to be "authenty", or that their mock-Tudor lingo is a bit rubbish, simply avoiding contractions and spicing their sentences with a "mayhap" here and a "By St Luke" there, a bit like Martha Jones addressing Shakespeare in "Doctor Who" (the subtitles translating their made-up Tudor exchanges provide some of the funniest moments in the film.) Some of the personal stories were rather poignant (one man having lost half his right arm handling period explosives) and some of the anecdotes quite funny (visiting kids believing they had truly traveled back in time) or touching (an actress in a 1942 recreation uncomfortable with saying her son had died in the war), but as a whole, the documentary feels a bit overlong and perhaps self-indulgent. Maybe if I had known in advance what its actual focus was, I would have been less disappointed. Or maybe I would have liked it more if the recreators has been kookier or more eccentric, like the "Star Trek" fans from the "Trekkies" films. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Living With the Tudors

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