Crass it might be, but the one thing people want to know about Elizabeth I, is did she or didn't she do it.

According to Kapur's film she did it, lots. This certainty is refreshing. He might be wrong, but if you're going to grasp a theory then you might as well make it so positive it feels organic.

Kapur, the Indian director of "Bandit Queen" had never ever heard of Elizabeth when he was asked to make the film.

The combination of irreverence and respect with regards to her sex life here is clearly the work of a man who looked at the evidence and thought it was about time we stopped being so British.

Even in the latest biography of Elizabeth, Alison Weir is as irritatingly prim as any Victorian biographer. Weir has it that Elizabeth 'enjoyed all the advantages of male companionship without surrendering her body.' Hmm.

Elizabeth famously adored Robert Dudley, her Master of the Horse, whom she soon promoted to Earl of Leicester with a massive annual wage.

Everybody hated him at court, because he was handsome and ambitious and got to spend private time with Elizabeth. "Lord Robert does whatever he likes with affairs" noted an Italian visitor. When they danced he would twirl her into the air "after the Florentine style, with a high magnificence that astonished beholders".

Nobody touched the Queen like this. She was God's china doll. Divine. When suitors came to propose marriage, Dudley and Elizabeth would brawl. He would storm off, wretched. She would flirt with others and sulk, then call Dudley back to court and beg for his affection.

Sounds like sex to me. Kapur's film sneakily speeds up and rewinds history, starting with Mary's death and ending with Elizabeth as firm sovereign.

Elizabeth is an exciting film. It ought to be. This was a time of dread. Protestant versus Catholic, an embryonic secret service brandishing bitterness, a young woman surrounded by snarls behind smiles.

Kapur uses Dudley's shoddy behaviour as an explanation for why Elizabeth never married. It's an effective enough theory, but it didn't really satisfy me.

The truth is far juicier. Elizabeth not only associated marriage with a loss of personal and political control, but with death. Her mother had gone to block for marrying the wrong man. Elizabeth would have been a modern psychoanalyst's dream.

But Kapur does attempt a glance at her religious equivocation. His Elizabeth is irritated by religious zeal. Thoroughly the woman once quoted as saying "there is only one Jesus Christ. The rest is a dispute about trifles". What a dispute.

Cate Blanchett is scrupulous in the title role. On the one hand this vivid, bohemian, free creature, on the other very straight. No eyebrows and a fierce gob.

As for Joe Fiennes as Dudley, now there's a piece of casting. Ah, Joseph. With his toasted eyes overloaded by girlie lashes. He first appears here on a white horse in a summer meadow with his shirt half hanging off.

The effect on the women in the audience was, let's just say, memorable.