In the Paris of the mob, during the French Revolution, a patrician
British lady supports the monarchy and defies the citizens' committees
that rule the streets. She does this not in the kind of lame-brained
action story we might fear, but with her intelligence and
personality--outwitting the louts who come to search her bedroom, even as
a wanted man cowers between her mattresses.
Eric Rohmer's "The Lady and the Duke" is an elegant story about an
elegant woman, told in an elegant visual style. It moves too slowly for
those with impaired attention spans, but is fascinating in its style and
mannerisms. Like all of the films in the long career of Rohmer, it centers
on men and women talking about differences of moral opinion.
At 81, Rohmer has lost none of his zest and enthusiasm. The director,
who runs up five flights of stairs to his office every morning, has
devised a daring visual style in which the actors and foreground action
are seen against artificial tableaux of Paris circa 1792. These are not
"painted backdrops," but meticulously constructed perspective drawings,
which are digitally combined with the action in a way that is both
artificial and intriguing.
His story is about a real woman, Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), who told
her story in a forgotten autobiography Rohmer found 10 years ago. She was
a woman uninhibited in her behavior and conservative in her politics, at
onetime the lover of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV), then of
Phillipe, the Duke of Orleans (father of the future king Louis Phillipe).
Leaving England for France and living in a Paris townhouse paid for by the
Duke (who remains her close friend even after their ardor has cooled), she
refuses to leave France as the storm clouds of revolution gather, and
survives those dangerous days even while making little secret of her
monarchist loyalties.
She is stubbornly a woman of principle. She dislikes the man she hides
between her mattresses, but faces down an unruly citizens' search
committee after every single member crowds into her bedroom to gawk at a
fine lady in her nightgown. After she gets away with it, her exhilaration
is clear: She likes living on the edge, and later falsely obtains a pass
allowing her to take another endangered aristocrat out of the city to her
country house.
Her conversations with the Duke of Orleans (attentive, courtly
Jean-Claude Dreyfus) suggest why he and other men found her fascinating.
She defends his cousin the king even while the Duke is mealy-mouthed in
explaining why it might benefit the nation for a few aristocrats to die;
by siding with the mob, he hopes to save himself, and she is devastated
when he breaks his promise to her and votes in favor of the king's
execution.
Now consider the scene where Grace Elliott and a maid stand on a
hillside outside Paris and use a spyglass to observe the execution of the
king and his family, while distant cheering floats toward them on the
wind. Everything they survey is a painted perspective drawing--the roads,
streams, hills, trees and the distant city. It doesn't look real, but it
has a kind of heightened presence, and Rohmer's method allows the shot to
exist at all. Other kinds of special effects could not compress so much
information into seeable form.
Rohmer's movies are always about moral choices. His characters debate
them, try to bargain with them, look for loopholes. But there is always
clearly a correct way. Rohmer, one of the fathers of the New Wave, is
Catholic in religion and conservative in politics, and here his heroine
believes strongly in the divine right of kings and the need to risk your
life, if necessary, for what you believe in.
Lucy Russell, a British actress speaking proper French we imagine her
character learned as a child, plays Grace Elliott as a woman of great
confidence and verve. As a woman she must sit at home and wait for news;
events are decided by men and reported to women. We sense her imagination
placing her in the middle of the action, and we are struck by how much
more clearly she sees the real issues than does the muddled Duke.
"The Lady and the Duke" is the kind of movie one imagines could have
been made in 1792. It centers its action in personal, everyday
experience--an observant woman watches from the center of the
maelstrom--and has time and attention for the conversational styles of an
age when evenings were not spent stultified in front of the television.
Watching it, we wonder if people did not live more keenly then. Certainly
Grace Elliott was seldom bored.
From Chicago Sun-Times
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