The Lady And The Duke

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Film Description

Rohmer's magisterial adaptation of the memoirs of a courageous, well-connected British aristocrat in danger of losing her head at the time of the Revolution. Imaginative use of digital technology recreates Paris during the Terror as if it were a living painting, while Lucy Russell's fine leading performance helps to point up the enduring relevance of Rohmer's attack on fanaticism and intolerance.

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Review by Mike McCahill on 8th July 2002

The seventy-two year old French director Eric Rohmer here takes the cinematic old-guard’s staple genre - the lavish costume drama - and films it through the lens of the type of digital video camera more commonly to be found in the sweaty palms of rookie filmmakers anxious for their first
break.

Englishwoman in Revolution-era Paris Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell) is a fervently patriotic aristocrat, but the Duke of Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) is one of the capital’s leading anti-Royalists. What results is a curious courtship in which consummation has (one must presume) already taken
place: though it may have simmered down, their relationship - as intellectual as emotional - is still seriously sexy stuff, and not just because the subtitles often occupy the same position in the frame as Russell’s décolletage.

Rohmer uses the medium’s pixels as delicate brushstrokes, placing digitally captured actors within paintings of the era. History does indeed "come alive" in The Lady And The Duke, its streets teeming with extras, but it comes with poignant side-effects, particularly in its scenes at night, where - lit only by the moon - the characters already look like ghosts. Engrossing even if you don’t know your Jacobins from your sans-culottes.

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Review by anonymous on

Eric Rohmer’s lavish digital-video costume drama charts the relationship between the Duke of Orleans and an Englishwoman in Paris at the start of the French Revolution. Aside from its painterly composition and involving love story, there’s also all the revolting peasants and heaving bosoms a viewer could want.

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