Film review: WE

THINGS I have learned from watching WE: Sotheby’s are quite happy for you to rummage through their auction artefacts in the manner of a Saturday morning bring-and-buy sale. Mohammed Al-Fayed is handsome and urbane.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were absolutely not Nazi sympathisers – mere “gossip” apparently, although the film doesn’t enlighten us as to why Wallis and Edward visited Hitler at his Berchtesgaden right up until 1937.

Other things I have learned from WE: apparently a security guard’s salary can pay for a trendy loft apartment in New York, complete with piano. And Madonna has a Vogue photographer’s eye for decorative fashions, but a cloth ear for great dialogue. When actors emote Material Girl tropes like “Do you think we can change our own destiny?”, the film feels like a form of Chinese water torture in which tinny lines take the place of drips.

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The WE tour seems to have been going on for months but only now do audiences get the chance to see Madonna’s peculiar sympatico portrait of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), a woman who could shake a mean martini and captivated a king (James D’Arcy), which is intercut with a dreary story about Wally (Abbie Cornish), an unhappily married Manhattan housewife obsessed by the Windsors.

What is it about a twice-divorced American who disastrously falls for an undertalented English partner that proved so attractive to Wally and the artist formerly known as Mrs Guy Ritchie?

The positives are that her movie has all the polished good looks of her Vogue pop video. The negatives are that Madonna’s idea of an independent woman dresses in nice lingerie and sacrifices her ambitions in the hope of pleasing her man.

WE is so weirdly directed and edited that you keep wondering if this is a cheese dream. Even basic history bends like a Salvador Dali watch so the “archive” footage of his funeral describes George VI as George III.

There are certainly moments you won’t forget, such as the Duke of Windsor on his deathbed begging Wallis to “dance for me, one last time”. Tenderly she cranks up Chubby Checker and starts twisting the night away, grinning broadly. Since we watched this remarkable moment in history, my partner has adopted this as shorthand for requests that require immediate cheerful submission. “Dance for me,” he commands, waving his empty coffee cup meaningfully.

Earlier on, a soirée spiked with the Prince of Wales’s personal amphetamine stash prompts everyone to dance to the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant. Ken Russell offcuts like these helped me sit through the rest of WE rather than flee to some happier place, such as an Iranian prison.

• On general release from Friday

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