A Public increasingly disenchanted with monarchy; a hostile press using telescopic lenses to spy out regal indiscretion; the untimely death of the most popular royal: although set in the 1860s, Mrs Brown (PG) has unwittingly acquired some grim contemporary resonances. John Madden’s film charts the relationship between the bereaved Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and her faithful Balmoral retainer John Brown (Billy Connolly), an association that lifted the monarch from the depths of morbid introspection, but in the process generated a murky Brown/ Windsor soup of rumour. History has forced topicality upon Jeremy Brock’s script, but it is already busy finding parallels between 19th-century royalty and our own. It subscribes to the post-Morton view of monarchy as a machine engaged in freezing the humanity from those born or married into it. As Brown is warned on his arrival at Osborne House, “You don’t tell Her Majesty how you feel.” This is the watchword of royal etiquette, and a sentiment straight out of Diana’s Panorama interview.
Provocatively, Brock raises the issue of media intrusion: “The public has a right to its interest in you,” insists Victoria’s Private Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby (a lugubrious Geoffrey Palmer), as Brown rages about scurrilous remarks in Punch. Not quite so topically, we see a divided Tory government clinging desperately to power, and politicians commenting on the Queen’s state of mind rather as Nicholas Soames did on Diana’s.Before her bereavement, Victoria had been something of a party animal – her busy social life included balls, concerts and sensational plays (she went three times to see Dion Boucicault’s rip-roaring drama The Colleen Bawn).

Her huge family also indicates that she liked more about Albert than his title (fact-fans note: he did actually have a kinkily augmented penis). When Albert died in December 1861, theatres closed down at the height of the pantomime season, crackers went unpulled. Victoria became a virtual recluse, entering a period that – rather unfairly – has made her name a byword for sexual repression and buttoned-up emotional incapacity.A film of the Mrs Brown story was mooted over 20 years ago, with Sean Connery destined for the kilt part – but pressure from the Palace quashed the project. No such objections could be raised here: there’s only the vaguest whiff of the improper in Madden’s movie.

It would have been easy to suggest that royal hand had wandered under hired sporran, but every tartan pleat hangs undisturbed – they might have ponies, whisky and bad temper in common, but this VR and JB are just good friends.Madden’s grip on the period is reasonably secure: instead of attempting any broad portrait of Victorian society, he focuses on a handful of figures at the top. And although Connolly’s lines sometimes wander out of the 19th-century idiom, and Geoffrey Palmer’s over-indulge in it, there’s little that will jar with Heritage Cinema junkies. Mercifully, Madden also resists the temptation to produce a Balmoral travelogue or frock- shots for button-hook fetishists. And the film isn’t, as some have claimed, another paean to Scotland – Madden makes London a chaos of uncomfortably tight location shots, but he casts the Highlands as a terrain of picturesque misery, in line with Disraeli’s comment about “the land of Calvin, oatcakes and sulphur”.This is, however, a film primarily interested in actors acting.