Something rotten in Denmark: A Royal Affair

I am seldom, in fact almost never, a fan of 1. costume drama 2. programs about royalty 3. programs set in castles 4. historical fiction - so why on earth would I expect to like A Royal Affair? Yet I did! It's a really good film, highly engaging and informative (instructs as well as pleases). In brief, young English woman (we know nothing of her background) is married to the young Danish King Christian, ca 1760 (before they even meet) and she sets off to begin her life as the Queen of Denmark - immediately it's obvious that the King is insane; though she bears him a child, she is trapped in her relationship, sometimes even physically endangered; ultimately, she falls in love with the King's personal physician (and closest confidant). The physician, a serious believer in Enlightenment ideas, gets King Christian to support various liberal reforms - until at last the nobility overrules the King and executes the physician. The wife dies shortly after that, but we learn in an epilogue that their son went on to be (as King Frederick) the greatest reformer in Danish history. All based on historical fact, I believe. Well, many movies based on fact are dry as a textbook, but Royal Affair carefully develops the three main characters, with their passions and their faults; King C. is especially weird and interesting to watch, with his strange and childlike outbursts and his bizarre crudeness. The movie, unlike so many court-dramas, has a great and astute sense of social class and of the life of ordinary people in Denmark at this time - the terrible oppression of the peasants (one brutal scene shows a man who'd been tortured to death probably for stealing) and the urban poor; we see the idiocy and narcissism of the court society as well - willfully oblivious to the suffering around them and to their exploitation of the entire national wealth. The depiction of the era is very well done - down the the hardships of travel by coach, the primitive state of 18th-century medicine, as well as the luxuiousness of the court: the contrasts are what make this movie, and what differ it from so many others. The execution scene is painfully vivid. Only flaw(s): it is a little long (could do with fewer en plein air romantic, Zhivago-like scenes) and the Queen kind of fades from the plot at the end (as she did in life, no doubt). Overall, though, a surprisingly honest and provocative movie that rises well above the conventions of the genre.