Liam Daniel/Apparition Films
Rule Britannia, the early years: Emily Blunt as the young
Queen Victoria of England.

In one portrait of the young Queen Victoria, the 18-year-old who ascended the British throne in 1837 and gave the Victorians their name, she sits in her coronation robes staring straight ahead with a somewhat glazed expression. Her arms are white and fashionably plump, her dress cream and splashed with gold. Her coronation robe, a massive ermine-and-red-velvet cloak, spills off her bared shoulders and onto the ground, creating a luxurious puddle. She looks a bit bored — heavy hangs the crown, or at least those opulent threads.

This isn’t our familiar image of Victoria, the globular old lady shrouded in widow’s weeds and vehement melancholia, and wearing a dour look that suggests that she was never amused, not now, not ever. That woman, who became known as the Widow of Windsor after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, is nowhere to be seen in “The Young Victoria,” a frivolously entertaining film, with Emily Blunt, about the young monarch. Ms. Blunt, who as Meryl Streep’s viperous assistant in “The Devil Wears Prada” slyly upstaged Anne Hathaway, doesn’t have Victoria’s padding or bearing, which is probably why she was cast in the role. No one wants to watch the lives and loves of the rich and dowdy.

That at least seems to be the prevailing filmmaker wisdom, which is why what we usually get in movies about royal personages from dusty and distant worlds are sumptuous frocks, soaring music, a dash of intrigue and thunderous nonsense. “Young Victoria” — the latest in a long line of fictional entertainments about the dramatic, if more often than not melodramatic, ups and downs of female British monarchs — fits the bill nicely. There’s something about a queen that inspires filmmakers (audiences too), who enjoy pulling the curtain away from these most private lives and taking peeks under the royal robes. Because this queen spent so much of her life draped in black and gloom, her younger self would seem particularly ripe material.

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