Having already applied her insights to Eva Perón as a performer, Madonna now lavishes the full force of her empathy and historical sense on another strong-yet-vulnerable power behind the throne – in this, her second movie as director and co-writer. Her heroine is Wallis Simpson, the woman who as storm clouds of war gathered, fell in love with the British king, helped cause his abdication. Edward VIII was supposed to have given up everything for her. But what, Madonna's film asks poignantly, did she give up for him? A feisty divorced American, married to a prominent Brit, vilified, misunderstood … oh dear.Andrea Riseborough plays Wallis in the cocktail-quaffing 1930s, and, in a parallel world, Abbie Cornish plays Wally, a lonely, beautiful, maritally abused but reassuringly wealthy woman in Manhattan in 1998, who finds herself obsessed with Wallis's story and haunted by the gutsy Mrs Simpson herself. The multi-tier concept is pinched from Michael Cunningham's The Hours.
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