The Duchess
Period pieces are a sub-genre with several requirements- lush costumes (which are Oscar-worthy here), elegant production design (ditto), swooning music (which Rachel Portman delivers with lovely gravity), and generally, some sort of romantic entanglement. Don’t ask me why the latter always seems to be the case (maybe that’s the only reason why this type of thing would be interesting), but it is. Truth told, they’ve never exactly been my cup of tea- 🙂 – but they’re always good for an interesting story.
This one is among the most interesting of recent years, with Kiera Knightley- the recent queen of the bodice (see “Pride & Prejudice,” “Atonement,” and the “Pirates” adventures)- as Georgiana, a young woman of beauty and fashion who- in 1774- was married off to William the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), and became the Duchess of Devonshire. Throughout the film we watch the ebbs and flows of their marriage, the independent spirit “G” possesses that leads her to be outspoken about politics, and the outside romantic entanglements that lead to controversy and possible humiliation for both. Did I mention this is based on a true story? (Actually, it’s based on the book by Amanda Foreman, but the story is nonetheless true.)
One of the film’s most intriguing aspects watching it in the 21st Century is seeing the contrasts within that society with today’s. Of course, anyone with even a touch of experience watching period films knows the subservient roles largely played by women, how marriages were arranged more for the purpose of stature than love, and where sex between partners had more to do with producing an heir than it was expressing affection for one another. But in the context of this story, and the ways in which all three intersect in how the events of the marriage unfold, one can’t help but become engaged in this story.
Of course, much of that has to do with the performances and the actors themselves. Knightley is magnetic, recalling the charisma and free-spirit in the late Princess Diana in how her character behaves with everyone from her young children to her sometimes-cold husband to the friend (Hayley Atwell as best friend Bess) William will take as his mistress after Georgiana invites her to stay during hard times to her old friend Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper), a political idealist with whom she has an affair with. She’s a live-wire who uses beauty to her advantage, and her whip-smart intelligence as a way of making everyone love her. As William, Fiennes can sometimes be as cold as he was in “Schindler’s List” and as Voldemort in “Harry Potter”- a scene where, in a rage, he takes the Duchess by force, is intense in its’ emotions- but there are scenes where we see a vulnerability in the character we’re not used to seeing out of the actor. In these moments, we see how both characters are trapped by the rules their society has made around them, only to see how the two manage to find a genuine happiness in spite of them by the end.
