The Duchess - Review

Pray you, name three movies made by Saul Dibb, the director of The Duchess. As far as you are little likely to succeed in that, you wouldn’t have problems mentioning a fairly recent costume biopic retrosepcting on a life of a prominent female figure. Reevaluating the importance of historical girl power had become a trend at the turn of this century, particularly if the subjects happened to be sporting tent-sized dresses and sky-high wigs. From Kate Blanchet playing Elisabeth I in Elisabeth and its sequel, to the utterly post-feminist damsel played by Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette— the lives of our historical role models (or anti-heroines) have been re-shot with women as the centerpieces, not Hollywood-like glamorous add-ons. Or at least that was the goal.
In that line, and with the amalgam of 18th century salon drama, sex, treason and coyness of a modern 5th Avenue girl, came this zeitgeist-filled picture with Keira Knightley, who plays Georgiana, the Duches of Devonshire, and gracefully digs her character out from underneath layers of lace, muslin and bows. After all, Georgiana Cavendish (born Spencer) was a beautiful socialite, a Whig party activist, a pre-feminism post-feminist-- who did not shy from expressing herself through fashion-- and the ancestor of the unfortunate Lady Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales. And even if the plot bares poorly covered resemblance to the life of Lady D., what comes across much more evidently than even the motif of lost freedom (which the filmmakers managed to suffocate with a sea of tulle) is a simple message: we need to pity our fore-mothers, no matter the blood color. As women, they went through hell.
With the consumerism-oriented post-feminism and Sex and the City culture came a need for films about glamorous role models of the past. These women are no longer pale attachments to male protagonists, fainting damsels or tableaux vivants—they are flesh-and-bone heroines living lives of contemporary women… centuries ago. Particularly, Elisabeth, Marie Antoinette and now the Duchess of Devonshire (with Lady D. in mind) became examples for slowly self-educating audiences-- those most glittering examples, of course—of how high-born women were, and in some cases, still are, prisoners of their situation, but also of how tough and cool they were.
The Duchess brings an eye-popping image of 18th century England, but not a perfect picture. As life would back then, the movie plot drives the heroine through her procreation-oriented early marriage with a much older and grouchy Duke of Devonshire, William (Ralph Fiennes), who manages to simultaneously pressure his young wife for a male heir, disappoint her with his strictly “practical” view of marital sex, and exercise --as a real spoiled middle-aged aristocrat-- relations with other women, not even bothering to hide that fact. Soon a classical marriage triangle (including common meals) throws unhappy Georgiana into the arms of her romance-man, Lord Gray (Dominic Cooper), a Prime-Minister-to-be. Meanwhile, after producing (to Duke’s rage) two daughters, Georgiana finally gives birth to the anticipated male heir. Seemingly free now, she comes to realize that her children, the thing that was supposed to free her from her husband’s tyranny, are the very reason for her coming lifetime bondage. Another feminizing production underlines shyly that babies are a bother.
Georgiana, like Marie Antoinette, is pressured for a male heir, and the daughters to whom they both give birth are overlooked and despised—not unlike their mothers. Elisabeth is pressured to marry for the same reasons (and, of course, she refuses). These movies go beyond the costume / biographic genre. They become most of all dramas. And, despite the humor and certain satirical qualities, they are not free from pathos. As impish as she is, Marie Antoinette admits at one point “Letting everyone down would be my greatest unhappiness.” And the talk is, of course, about producing a baby boy—the main duty of the Queen of France. However popular she is among the crowds, however rich, however fashionable, however low bow the admirers, the baby remains the bottom line for all three women. And only one of them manages to change that.
So all that keeps them alive is the society and fashion. As far as the consciously pop-cultural Marie Antoinette was supposed to serve as a sort of pastiche of consumer culture and evoke modern notion with contemporary music and many “modern-chic” customs (like having a gay hair dresser), the other biopics are also somehow different from what we learned in history classes or saw in early movies. And that’s not only because of, say, Blanchet’s face which we know from contemporary tabloids. It’s the focus of the entire plot and its intrusiveness into private lives of those alienated women that is new. It tells the story from their point of view.
But Dibb attempted a larger sweep on the question of freedom, into which he incorporated not only women, or aristocratic women, but the entire aristocracy. “How happy they are to be so free,” proclaims Georgiana’s husband dreamily, watching their children playing in the gardens. This complex character—showed once raping his wife, another time saying “I love you in the way I understand love”—is in Dibb’s mind in the cage together with Georgiana. He is under pressure for a male heir because of his high status. And however much praise Fiennes deserves for creating a believably ambiguous villain, the character’s motivation and our sympathy towards him remain questionable.
The motif of freedom jumps at the viewers quite chunkily at many more occasions. The film opens with young Georgina playing with her friends in the vast, green gardens of her family estate—a pretty uncovered allusion to youthful independence, to which the previously described scene is an obvious allusion. In the end, Georgiana plays at the gardens of the Devonshire manor with her children—both, the house and children being symbols of her bondage, and the scene an antithesis of the opening. However, to be fair, at the end, no one can be really free in that colonial empire. At least according to Dibb. The talk of American colonies and the fight for independence reoccurs constantly (giving Georgiana a chance to deliver her key line: “One cannot be moderately dead, or moderately in love. Or moderately free.”) Neither Georgina nor William, nor Lady Beth (Hayley Atwell)—the other woman-- nor anyone else of the aristocracy, can allow themselves to lead their lives as they wish, when facing the rigid and inhumane societal system. They are all prisoners. A pseudo communist manifesto? Perhaps. But why in a movie that was already well focused on women? The Duchess tries to grasp too much and chokes on its sweep of moralizing, and revealing things that are pretty much known for at least a century.
That being said, the brief moments of Georgiana’s happiness give occasion for spectacular costuming show-off. Indeed, the zeitgeist in The Duchess is absolutely present, even despite the way-too-modern air brought by Keira Knightley. (A fresh breeze might be a desired thing in most movies, but not in era-specific productions-- this is exactly the case with Marie Antoinette as well). And, luckily, despite the fact that The Duchess—as opposed to Marie Antoinette-- was not shot by a woman director , both were made with a closely woman-centered, understanding attitude, which attitude makes them a completely different breeds of the costume genre than flicks like 300 or The Last Samurai.