By John Duncan Talbird.
Peter Strickland’s new film, The Duke of Burgundy, is a cleverly beautiful and beautifully crafted exploration of the humiliation of servitude and the power struggles that take place in a relationship. It’s about the compromises and the banality of routine that comes with love. And it’s about S&M.
We open on a young woman, Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) in sylvan setting, sitting on a boulder in dappled light, watching the water play over rocks in a little creek. She’s lovely in the sunlight, the sound of running water is lovely. Her expression is hard to read. Troubled? Sad? We don’t know. She gets on her bicycle and then we get the opening credits: lurid colors, freeze-frames, trippy music – acoustic guitar and sampled in-suck of breath – by indie pop band Cat’s Eyes; it sounds as if it might have come from the record collection of a Nick Drake or Nico fan. The credits are so out-of-synch with the simple opening scene that we immediately suspect that everything’s not quite what it seems in this film. It’s the kind of postmodern trick that we see in a movie like Haneke’s Funny Games (1997 and 2007) where, in the opening of that film, a happy family’s car ride to their summer home is suddenly disrupted by the nondiegetic and psychotic sounds of John Zorn’s band Naked City.
Evelyn pulls up at a house and knocks at the door. A woman is beating a carpet across the way and regards the young woman with suspicion. The wait seems long, but finally the door opens and an older woman, middle-aged, stares coldly at Evelyn, says, “You’re late.” This woman, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), puts Evelyn to work cleaning the house while she sits in a chair reading, drinking wine, eating chocolate bonbons and dropping the wrappers on the carpet. When Evelyn finishes this task, Cynthia puts her to work cleaning her panties. Unfortunately, Evelyn misses one and she has to be punished. Cynthia drags Evelyn into a bathroom, slams the door, there’s a pause and then we hear the sound of a running liquid, Evelyn choking on something. If your employees fall down on the job, you can fire them. Or you can urinate in their mouths.
The next day, we have the same scenario. Although this time, we’re given Cynthia’s perspective. While Evelyn stands outside ringing the bell, we see Cynthia at her vanity, putting on lipstick. She reads a card written in neat cursive, instructions we see, a script. She is to make Evelyn wait at least thirty seconds, but no longer than two minutes. Cynthia opens the door, is stern with Evelyn again, puts her to work polishing her boots out on the patio, and then Cynthia sits down to work and falls into daydreaming. We cut to Evelyn outside and see her impatiently looking over her shoulder where Cynthia sits at her table. She bangs on the glass and then returns to her seat, not polishing the boots. Cynthia jerks out of her daze and goes outside to scold Evelyn for not working. We begin to understand that the sadist doesn’t have all the power in this relationship; in fact, she may have almost none of it.
Strickland’s film cleverly plays with our assumptions throughout. But he’s not just interested in tricks and intellectual games. These are real characters, wholly inhabited by the two central actors. We see them in three dimensions and begin to care about them, especially Knudsen’s Cynthia who we come to see as unhappy in this relationship. We begin to see that the problems of their relationship are arising from the usual culprits in any relationship – lack of communication, incompatible desires, and boredom – not really what goes on in the bedroom. Speaking of which, the film has some very erotic scenes, such as Cynthia sitting on a dresser, Evelyn on her knees, face between her legs, the sex shot through a window, a moth batting from bottom to top. You might be surprised to realize that there’s actually no nudity in the film.
Speaking of that moth, both women are entomologists. Cinematographer Nic Knowland’s shots seem to caress the corpses of caterpillars and butterflies pinned in boxes hanging on the wall (the Duke of Burgundy is a type of butterfly, by the way). There is a seasonal aspect to the story. There is talk of the institute where Cynthia and Evelyn research closing for the winter and this is a May-December relationship. But metaphorical musings about this film are less interesting than the visual and sonic potentials in these characters’ vocations (there are a few scenes where we get to hear the sound of mole crickets, a dissonant high-pitched screeching). As the stitching of the relationship seems to come undone, there is a stunningly assaultive scene, one of the most interesting uses of CGI that I’ve seen, where Evelyn walks through a swarm of butterflies which begin to multiply until they’re filling the screen, blotting out all else and their batting wings become deafening. This fragmentation of reality is a similar narrative strategy to the conclusion of Strickland’s previous film, Berberian Sound Studio (2012), though more effectively rendered here.
Strickland has cited the influence of sixties and seventies horror “B” films, but his movies cite these predecessors without imitating them. His films also quote art films. Berberian clearly references Bergman’s Persona (1966) and The Duke makes indirect homage to Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967). Berberian, though, which riffs on Italian horror movies like those of Jesús Franco, Mario Bava, and Dario Argento, is a more inward-focused film although its overall strategy is similar in some ways, Berberian a horror film without physical violence and The Duke a sex film without nudity. However, I suspect it’s harder to get into Berberian if one isn’t familiar with the source material. In contrast, The Duke, despite its sensational subject matter, is about real human relationships, why they work, why they go wrong sometimes, why people stay in them even when they’re unhappy.
The Duke of Burgundy is British writer/director Peter Strickland’s third film (his first, the little-seen micro-budgeted Katalin Varga [2009]), but he is already showing a mastery not seen by many more-experienced directors. This film tackles universal themes in a fresh way. And the care with which this strange movie has been crafted is plain in every scene: the setting, the costumes, the mannered though natural way that the actors deliver their lines. The film seems to evoke a place that might never have existed outside of fairy tales. The women – there are only women in this movie, which you might not realize at first – ride bicycles, they write on manual typewriters, they live in old stone mansions lit with candelabras. But they record those crickets and play them back using modern technology (of course, on vinyl). The film reminds me of another British Peter, Greenaway, particularly his The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover (1989) – the intentional anachronisms, the arch movements and delivery of the actors, the care taken with mise-en-scène. However, although Greenaway’s films are always beautifully made, I find them cold. They don’t invite the viewer in, I think, mainly because the writer/director doesn’t really seem to care about his characters very much. His characters are generally ciphers, not fully realized humans. Strickland’s new film, on the other hand, is very much about real-life people, their struggles, their joys and pain. It only looks like a movie.
John Duncan Talbird is the author of the just-released, limited edition book of stories, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar) with images by artist Leslie Kerby. His fiction and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Juked, The Literary Review, Amoskeag, REAL and elsewhere. An English professor at Queensborough Community College, he lives with his wife in Brooklyn.