Peter Strickland (2014)
Peter Strickland’s third dramatic feature is extremely stylish and sometimes funny but nothing like as funny as Stephanie Zacharek’s description of the film as ‘A complex and ultimately moving essay on the privileges of victimhood and the nuances of what it means to suffer for love’. The Duke of Burgundy is situated outside a specific time and place. Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a lepidopterist, uses a manual typewriter to write up her scientific findings but neither the decor of the home she shares with her lesbian lover Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) nor their clothes gives a clue as to the precise pastness of the story being told. The setting is rural and sylvan, the local people are all women, and the cast are mostly (perhaps all?) non-native speakers of English. Their accented voices, as well as heightening the artificiality of the piece, lend the proceedings a vaguely exotic flavour (and because the stress sometimes lands on the wrong English word, a disorienting quality too). All in all, Strickland evokes once-upon-a-time-in-a-land-far-away a lot more effectively than Rob Marshall did in Into the Woods.
We don’t know at first that Cynthia and Evelyn live together. It appears that Evelyn is an uncomplaining skivvy and Cynthia her demanding employer. Dressed in what could be a uniform, Evelyn gets off her bike and knocks on the door. Cynthia opens it and tells her off for being late, before setting Evelyn to work on household chores. These are followed by a giveaway foot massage. It soon becomes clear that this is all part of the couple’s elaborate daily ritual, that Evelyn is a masochist and that she, rather than Cynthia, calls the shots in their relationship. In the first of their bed scenes (which feature a reasonably disgruntled-looking Siamese cat, curled up on the bed), Cynthia says how happy she is to be with Evelyn. The latter demands to be told otherwise and, when Cynthia obliges with critical remarks, asks for these to be delivered in a more convincing tone next time. As Evelyn’s birthday approaches, the two women interview a carpenter (Fatma Mohamed) about a possible present from Cynthia. It will take too long for the carpenter to construct what Evelyn would ideally like – a new bed with a built-in lower cabinet into which she can be locked while Cynthia lies above her. The next possible item for discussion is a human toilet. In the end, Evelyn has to make do with an unintegrated coffin-like chest in which Cynthia confines her until Evelyn asks to be released. It’s to the credit of Peter Strickland and his actresses that they keep The Duke of Burgundy entertaining – and genuinely comedic, thanks to the straight-faced delivery of the lines. This is true of the negotiations with the carpenter, the regularly recurring inserts of talks to a rapt audience on the finer points of lepidoptery and Strickland’s descriptions of the strains in a ménage based on theatrical sexual role play in general and masochism in particular. (Jealous Cynthia sees Evelyn polishing boots for a neighbour and has to know if the neighbour chastised Evelyn for doing this badly. ‘Only a little bit’, Evelyn insists.)
Peter Strickland pushes the butterfly imagery too hard. This is, from the start, inevitably reminiscent of The Collector and Strickland’s use of the creatures – larvae, pupae and fully- developed butterflies, flutteringly alive or pinned specimens on the wall – is, for all the technical ingenuity involved, obvious. (This is why the verbal aspect of the film is more fun.) Having set a narrative running, Strickland effects a crisis in Cynthia’s and Evelyn’s relationship, which the couple appear to resolve in a mutually satisfactory way. Because this compromise would probably be anti-climactic, Strickland opts to end with a virtual reprise of the opening sequence (this time we also see Cynthia in the house awaiting Evelyn’s arrival) – but this is no less underwhelming as a finale. All the cast are striking to look at but, with one exception, they come across as a series of arresting photographs, as masks rather than movie actresses. Sidse Babett Knudsen (best known as the star of Borgen) is much more sensually alive than the others, even when Cynthia is snoring in bed. While she’s physically imposing, she also conveys Cynthia’s discomfort getting dressed up in the figure-hugging dominatrix outfits insisted upon by Evelyn. (Once Cynthia pulls a muscle in her back, while helping to drag in the birthday present, she has a good excuse for changing into loose-fitting pyjamas, to Evelyn’s horror.) Strickland, with the help of his cinematographer Nic Knowland, luxuriates in the colours and textures of Cynthia’s wardrobe but he’s attentive too to the textures of her ripe and ageing flesh. The statuesque Sidse Babett Knudsen, because she humanises Cynthia, is occasionally affecting. But The Duke of Burgundy is essentially a sketch stretched into feature length by Peter Strickland’s film-making artifice.
23 May 2015
