Finding Harmony: The King’s Vision Review – There is a strange moment when Charles appears to have taken acid | television

WWe find ourselves at an interesting moment in streaming wars; One where Amazon’s programming policy has seemingly shifted to merely providing a massive platform for power. Last week saw the release of Melania Trump’s film (an annoying vanity project she was paid $75 million for) and this week it’s our turn, as the platform launches King Charles’s documentary Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision.

Why Jeff Bezos would want to curry favor with the most powerful people on the planet by paying to broadcast uncritical profiles of them is anyone’s guess. Either way, Finding Harmony is an incredibly frustrating movie to watch. It’s clearly a relatively important documentary about the climate crisis, and it’s been undone because of its innate sense of entitlement. Perhaps a better title would have been King Charles: Needless to say, I had the last laugh.

Running 90 minutes long — but feeling much longer, like the kind of thing designed to play on loop in the background of a conference — Finding Harmony’s underlying message is that the world is in trouble, but only because we haven’t listened to the King. He is, as we are told through Kate Winslet’s stunning narration, “a man who has spent his life building harmony,” which may come as a surprise to anyone who has read Prince Harry’s book.

The tone of adulation continues, with Charles telling us that he saw environmental collapse coming as far back as the 1960s, and interviewees noting that “people thought he was crazy.” We see him championing organic food, and headlines calling him crazy, before remembering that his once-fringe beliefs are now fully mainstream.

This is the main frustration. Because in the end he is right. Even with all the undeniable scientific evidence at our disposal, it remains impossible to get people to take the climate crisis seriously. If we all had the king’s foresight four or five decades ago, the world would likely be in better shape than it is now.

However, the film has a wonderful sense that King Charles was alone, which does not diminish the influence of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and the founders of Earth Day. This is only exacerbated when the film attempts to expand on other strands of the King’s mysterious “harmony” philosophy.

These include the restoration of Dumfries House, which we are told helped train the local community in traditional endeavors (and neglected to mention that it was at the center of a cash-for-honours scandal). He also shows us how the king paved the way in teaching prisoners beekeeping, and tells us how he helped rebuild Kabul by educating freed locals about the art.

If the latter sounds familiar, it’s because it formed part of Adam Curtis’s documentary Bitter Lake about Afghanistan, which had a clip of women reacting incredulously to an image of Duchamp’s urinal. Indeed, Finding Harmony often resembles a Curtis film, in the way it attempts to connect a range of disparate claims with an undulating array of stock footage.

These claims include: Walking in the forest is good because pine nuts get into your blood; The housing crisis is due to people’s unwillingness to live in ugly residential towers. The universe is full of patterns that repeat across space and time in a display of harmonious mathematics that influences our emotions and well-being. It has to be said that the latter comes off a little out of the blue, as if King Charles dropped a hidden tablet of acid and then spent the afternoon staring at the back of his hand.

Perhaps this is the reason why the film landed on Amazon. It seemed that the BBC was going to back away from some of the more ostentatious elements. Plus, as a company so nervous about the climate emergency that even David Attenborough has to go elsewhere when he needs to get home, it may have tried to undermine the King’s environmental warnings with footage of Jordan Peterson calling it nonsense. That’s not really enough, especially in a film that seems meticulously designed to emphasize the king’s legacy.

Either way, it’ll be great to see how it plays out on Amazon. Twenty years ago, a film with this level of reach would have been broadcast by a British monarch on a terrestrial channel, and people would have watched it in their millions, if only for the simple fact that nothing else was being shown. Here it will find itself in a submenu next to MrBeast and Italian Cartoons. Who knows if the King of England can compete with that anymore.