Anna and the King is back, starring a pinch-faced and quarrelsome Jodie Foster as Anna, the prim-yet-feisty English schoolmarm who arrives in 19th-century Siam to take on its cantankerous autocrat (Chow Yun-Fat) and his adorable children.
This is a long, even an epic, account of the story: two-and-a-half hours in which much of the unassuming lightness and domestic gaiety of the Hammerstein musical has been sacrificed to a dourly political sense of court intrigue and Siam’s warlike neighbours.
Jodie Foster herself does not go capering about, chirruping about how she’s getting to know them, getting to know all about them. There is no skittishness here; Jodie Foster does not do skittish. There is no confectionery in her performance. With her fierce nose and fiercer chin resembling some illegal two-pronged kung fu weapon, she is perfect casting for a more uncompromising, puritanical Anna. (Her English accent is rather good, incidentally, if apparently learnt at some sort of Celia Johnson boot camp. She importunes the king in the manner of a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret circa 1959: “The childrin all miss you tirribly, your majesteeeaaah.”)
Chow Yun-Fat is a powerful presence, too, though considering the great man’s track record in Hong Kong cinema and the works of John Woo, it is odd there’s no modish martial arts punch-up to endear the picture to the younger audience. All round, it is a little sober, but Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat are such intelligent, watchable performers that they take the romance of Anna’s Siamese adventure and transform it into something tougher and more modern.