Forget 50 Shades of Grey, the erotic
thriller you need to watch this month is Peter Strickland’s The Duke
of Burgundy. The Berberian Sound Studio director
is back with another lush, giallo-inspired offering that brings along a fair
amount of Hammer influences just for the hell of it. Every syllable uttered,
every frame of film, is sexually charged and full of meaning.
The Duke of Burgundy is hypnotically
gorgeous, deliberately paced, and lit like a 1970s softcore porn. Set in what
appears to be a female-only alternate reality, two lovers—entomologist Cynthia
(Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her maid Evelyn (Chiara D’Annna)—engage in a
dominant-submissive sadomasochistic relationship. Evelyn chides the younger
woman for being late, forces her to clean and re-clean the study over and over
again, and lets just say there are some unusual punishments when her undies
aren’t hand scrubbed just so—there’s tinkle involved.
Cynthia drags Evelyn to her entomology gatherings, seemingly
forcing her will on the young domestic. The true brilliance of The
Duke of Burgundy, however, comes in how Strickland builds your
expectations only to subvert them, pulling the rug out form underneath you,
changing how you look at the relationship he spends the first portion of the
film building. The true seat of power shifts multiple times throughout the
film, and more than that, your understanding of where the power lies is fluid.
As the two indulge in their role-play, scenes unfold
multiple times in almost identical fashion. Though the words said are the same,
what they mean is drastically different each time. The relationship changes and
frays as each drifts, pulls away, and comes back. Things start not to fit as
well, from clothes to roles to the custom locking drawer with hand restraints
Cynthia has specially constructed for Evelyn’s birthday. Psychologically
complex, their relationship is simultaneously abusive, tender, erotic, sensual,
and complicated.
Filmed in a warm, near hallucinatory haze, cinematographer
Nicholas D. Knowland’s camera wears a warm, gauzy filter and uses frames,
reflections, and boundaries to delineate the separate women just as refracted
images indicate the various sides of their relationship and distinct
personalities. It lends the whole film a voyeuristic feel of confinement that
runs all the way down toe the clothes—Cynthia is bound by her outfits, tied up
in corsets, contained in sleek, silky hose, confined, compartmentalized.
Stunning, startling images of insects, specifically various species of moths,
add a near monstrous horror effect, enhancing the strange sense of tension that
never lets up throughout the picture, driving the narrative forward.
For a movie that is all mood and atmosphere and implication,
The Duke of Burgundy has a remarkable human heart, with a
level of intimacy and empathy that you rarely encounter. As cold and chilly as
their staged erotic interactions can be, there’s a warmth, a tenderness, and a
genuine affection running beneath the surface. Within genre tropes, they
explore ideas of age and class, desire and romance.
A small story of extremes, The Duke of
Burgundy is dreamy and moving, visually and sonically vivid, and
completely unlike anything you’re going to see elsewhere. For all of the
influences, Strickland has crafted a wholly unique film that is both strange
and pedestrian, foreign and relatable. [Grade: A-]
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