The Lady and the Duke (L'Anglaise et le
Duc) is written and directed by Eric Rohmer, the renowned French New
Wave filmmaker and Cahier du cinéma critic. Based on Grace
Elliott's memoir "Journal of My Life During the French Revolution", The
Lady and the Duke reconstructs the Englishwoman's point of view
narration. Lover and friend of the Duke of Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus),
who is the cousin of King Louis XVI, Grace Elliot (Lucy Russell) is
trapped in France during the Revolution and often puts her life at risk by
voicing her royalist, anti-revolutionary views. Through her charm and
friendship, she manages to persuade the Duke to help her plot the escape
of an important political activist, yet she fails to dissuade him from
supporting the King's execution.
The Lady and the Duke successfully
establishes the two main characters' perspectives with subtle simplicity.
Always the subject of a patient, mostly motionless camera, Grace slowly
delivers her reactions to certain dramatic situations. In one scene, she
witnesses how the staked head of Princess de Lamballe --her friend and the
Duke's sister-in-law-- is paraded in the streets by "a gang of fanatics",
and concludes: "Such horror is inexcusable!" ("C'est horreur est sans
excuse!"). In another scene, she reflects on the risky experience of
having hidden the outlaw/activist inside her bedroom, and she describes
gracefully how she felt and justifies her moral commitment to helping the
vulnerable man. Contrasting her political views, yet equal in his
deliverance of them, the Duke explains to Grace that "[The Revolution],
although terrible for us to witness, will be good for our
children".
Aside from Rohmer's bold choices regarding point of
view, The Lady and the Duke represents the filmmaker's lifelong
concern with formalist experimentation in cinematic art. For The Lady
and the Duke, he commissioned a series of paintings (based on other
representations of the same period) and used them as sets for the film.
Shooting the actors with a blue screen background, then using digital
video technology to overlap the two planes, he gave the painted
backgrounds three-dimensional life. Interestingly, Rohmer's use of modern
technology recalls the classical style of theatrical staging, yet adds to
the the flat paintings or "sets" a spatial function with which the
characters interact. The result is an overall texture, enhanced by the
photography's soft amber tones, that emphasizes the artificiality of the
stage and that brings to the foreground the process of the
reconstruction of the historical reality. Simultaneously (or consequently)
this aesthetic/technical choice redefines the essence of the film as an
artistic endeavor that, through its conscious departure from the
mainstream conventions of the medium, explores and exposes its own
devices. (In Cahiers du cinéma no. 44 [1955], Rohmer argues for
"...a cinematic classicism, in terms that recall the 'synthetic' approach
to defining film's essence..." [Bordwell, David. "On the History of Film
Style." Harvard University Press, 1997].) Although the viewer may argue
that Rohmer's denaturalization process weakens the realism of the
historical accounts (and dismisses other technological possibilities of
modern cinema), he or she will nevertheless be intrigued by the film's
ability to evidence the "plasticity" of celluloid (and film art) and the
medium's close ties to painting, theatre and color
photography.
From www.cinephiles.net
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