feeling listless

Film The Lady & The Duke has rendered me speechless, so I'm letting some online reviewers do the work for me. Rohmer's film is a digital construct, and so, it seems is this review.

In the world of foreign cinema, nobody does pretentious talky films like the French, and of the French, nobody does it better than Eric Rohmer, legendary octogenarian auteur. Some consider his films nothing more than long conversations, and this one is no different. In addition, Rohmer's (Autumn Tale, A Summer's Tale) spare use of sets and camera work make the film look like it a transplant from the stage. The Lady and the Duke is actually adapted by Rohmer from Grace Elliot's Journal of My Life During the French Revolution. Elliot (1760-1823) was a British expatriate living in France during the turbulent revolutionary years, brought there by the Duke of Orleans. In her past life in Britain, she was a mistress of the Prince of Wales, who later became King George IV. A working knowledge of French history makes the film much more palatable, but if that's missing, just look at the pretty pictures. [Haro]

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. [Ebert]

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. [Ebert]

Rohmer evidently also recognised the core of a tragic love story in the vexed, tender, courteous but free-spoken relationship between Elliott and the ill-fated duke; and perhaps also Elliott's familial resemblance to his talkative, insistent but often touchingly inconsistent heroines. His characteristic insight gives emotional depth to Elliott's revulsion at the duke's treacherous vote for the king's execution. In the memoir it is presented as moral and political: 'I never felt such horror for anybody in my life as I did at that moment at the duke's conduct.' But the film subtly connects the intensity of Elliott's feelings to the duke's espousal of a new mistress with revolutionary leanings, and to Elliott's bitterness at her abandonment by the man she still loves: 'I've never felt so revolted by anyone. Having belonged to him once, I cannot bear myself.' [Philip Horne]

Lucy Russell's performance as Elliott is utterly striking, and shows a superbly confident mastery of French dialogue. She is intelligent, sensuous and passionate, but all in the most demandingly cerebral, grown-up sense, and with an intriguingly drawn hauteur. You can't help feeling that Rohmer, that Hitchcock scholar, has found in Russell his very own Grace Kelly. Still a relative newcomer (her only previous credit was in Christopher Nolan's Following), Russell is already a mature, evolved screen presence. If she can do American as well as she does French, the sky is the limit for the UK's brightest new screen star. [Peter Bradshaw]

But in the end… it all comes back to the way this was shot. And in many ways, that’s exactly what Rohmer intended. Frustrated with historical films shot in present-day Paris, or those which use “the same handful of old carriage doorways that always feature in period films”, he sought a third option. Wanting the film to look “just like a painting”, he commissioned artist Jean-Baptiste Marot to paint thirteen backdrops for the film. He shot the actors on bluescreen and digitally inserted them into the shots. By and large, it works. He’s able to add a sense of texture to the celluloid… It certain scenes, it actually looks like a painting is coming to life. [David Manning]

"The Lady and the Duke" isn't boring in the same way Rohmer's most recent pictures, set in the modern day, like 1998's "Autumn Tale," have been. There are no insufferable people socializing irritably around their outdoor dining tables. Nor are there many (or any, for that matter) nubile young babes whose pouty lips are intended to substitute for a story line. But it's dull in a very tasteful way, with none of the reverberating tenderness and sometimes surly vigor that characterize Rohmer's best work, things like "Summer" and "The Aviator's Wife." [Stephanie Zacharek]

But oh, those backdrops! Rohmer seems to have poured more feeling into them than he did into his characters, whether he meant to or not. Softly colored but vivid, they transport us not necessarily to another time, but to a place outside time where things of exquisite beauty -- paintings, music, buildings, landscapes -- can move us to a state of breathlessness. Rohmer stops time, in the good way, with those backdrops. Too bad that the rest of the time, he drags the minutes around like a dead weight. [Stephanie Zacharek]