When Montenaro Meets Belgravia: The Princess Switch
Confession of a Castleholic: Yours truly does have weak spot for cheesy fictional royal dramas. So much so that I can actually come up with a list of movies with the most ridiculous storylines - and guess what, we have new contender in town: Netflix's "The Princess Switch" with Vanessa Hudgens which came out just a couple of days ago. (Et mais oui, spoilers ahead.)
If you start to feel a bit of déjà vu while watching Netflix's latest holiday romance you would be excused: It's a new take on "The Parent Trap", which in turn was inspired by a book written by German author Erich Kästner, this time without parents but with significant others. When American baker Stacy visits the European country of Belgravia for a baking competition, she happens to run into the fiancée of the tiny nation's crown prince, who herself hails from the country of Montenaro. (Or so I think, while she is the Duchess of Montenaro, her late father was the Grand Duke of said place which doesn't really work in the grand scheme of royal titles. Oh and by the way, Duchess Margaret of Montenaro and Prince Edward of Belgravia don't actually love each other and only met twice before they got engaged because arranged marriages are still very much a thing among 21st century European royals.)
Looking more alike than identical twins and because nobody in the nation of Belgravia apparently knows what their future Crown Princess looks like, the two of them decide to switch places until midnight two days later. Naturally, both Stacy and her non-identical non-twin Margaret do fall in love and realise that having each other's lives would be pretty perfect. While there is no classic Cinderella (shoe) moment, the movie has everything a royal fairytale movie needs: Cobblestone streets lined with tiny old houses for a snowball fight, untouched snowy mountain ranges for the inevitable horseback ride and an orphanage - cause what's a royal movie without a poor orphan child told that they can be a princess, too, if they just have a pure heart and a plastic tiara?
You can take a guess how it will all pan out and you will probably won't be very far away from where the movie ends. It's cheesy, it's ridiculous and it's incredibly fun to watch. Because really, we all know what we are getting ourselves into when we decide to watch a good ol' romantic royal Christmas movie.
