Greatly encouraged by her mother, Lady Spencer (Charlotte Rampling), her17-year-old daughter, Georgina (Kiera Knightley), marries the much older William Cavendish, the fifth Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes).
She’s shocked to find that he’s affectionate with his two dogs but completely indifferent towards her. He openly has affairs with other women and brings the daughter from such a relationship to live with them.
She has two daughters but is unable to give Cavendish the male heir he desperately wants. Left to her own devices, she becomes famous for the fashions she designs and turns into a popular socialite.
She befriends Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell) whose husband has cast her out and deprived her of their three sons. Georgina invites her to stay with them but Elizabeth becomes Cavendish’s mistress.
Lending her popularity to the political campaign of the Whigs, she falls in love with rising politician Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper). Their affair provokes gossip and Cavendish threatens to take Georgina’s children away from her.
It’s a pity that most of the political part of Georgina’s life has been left out for this not only ties in with the main theme, that at the time laws were made by men for men, but it also has an interesting historical relevance in the Whigs’ attempts to bring about a social revolution including the abolishment of slavery in America.
But if the film concentrates on the loveless marriage and its accompanying emotional and sexual repercussions, it does so with an authentic sense of purpose. The screenplay is well developed so that this aspect of Georgina’s repressed life is consistently associated with the extreme discrimination against women in 18th century England.
The theme has been dealt with in several other films but The Duchess manages to be different. Such films are all too often excessively concerned with gender politics which make them less accessible. That approach also gives rise to the conflict of a period film being viewed from a contemporary perspective.
Co-writer/director Saul Dibb has avoided this altogether, dealing with the narrative in a dramatic, absorbing and often genuinely touching way while avoiding melodrama at all costs. Kiera Knightley gives her best performance so far. She’s on screen for most of the time and her portrayal is versatile enough to bring out Georgina’s various facets.
The film, however, minimises Georgina’s fondness for drinking and gambling (we only get one scene of each) and it makes Cavendish much older than he really was. Out of an excellent cast, Ralph Fiennes’ complex performance may risk being underestimated.
Actually he achieves the difficult task of showing the destructive effects his actions have on Georgina, while depicting his tyranny truthfully as part of the behaviour of a male aristocrat of the times, one whose cruelty is a matter of course rather than personal.
As in most British period films, the locations are wonderfully picturesque and the production design is lavish and detailed. Unlike some other directors, Dibb never turns this into a display for its own sake.
It’s beautifully photographed but the exteriors are utilised to introduce a change of location and no more. Similarly, the opulence of the settings is never overemphasised but forms the narrative’s legitimate backgrounds.
Luc Jaquet’s film is several rungs below his Oscar-winning documentary March of the Penguins which was the main reason why I chose to review this film. It follows a girl (Bertille Noel-Bruneau) who sees a fox (actually it’s a vixen), becomes fascinated by it and determines to tame it.
The fox eludes her, but after three seasons, the pair earns each other’s trust but when the girl takes it home, the outcome is nearly tragic.
The cinematography is ravishing, starting with the opening sequence which regales us with a panoramic shot of the Ain Mountains in France. From its lofty perch, the camera descends down to the woodland below where it picks out in striking detail, things like a spider at work and a mouse hiding from the fox.
The story is far too slender and the pace is slow with the girl and the fox taking 40 minutes to get together. The girl is depicted as an intruder upon nature, which is fair enough but the film is too unrealistic in insisting on portraying the fox in a completely idealistic and sanitised way.
We never see it doing any of the slaughtering of farm animals that foxes are notorious for. Jacquet only shows us the fox as the one being preyed upon, as the girl protects its cubs from an eagle and the fox from wolves.
It’s only in isolated scenes that the film rises above its low average. When the girl is injured while following the fox during the snowy winter, it’s a relief as the film momentarily abandons its falling between the two stools of documentary and fairy tale long enough to show us naturalistic scenes of the vixen and its mate playing in the snow.
Another sequence has the girl following the fox down a hole when the film turns surprisingly creepy.
In this English version, the narration, by Kate Winslet, irritates because it crosses every “t” and dots every “i” making one feel like a little child and it leaves nothing to the imagination.
The French version has a coda, showing the girl as an adult (Isabelle Carre), which definitely settles the issue of the film’s genre identity and some of the above unfavourable comments wouldn’t apply had it been left in the English version.
Apart from a single shot, the coda has been inexplicably cut from the version under review and the film’s ambiguity is retained till the very end.
