| Usually when the French Revolution is represented in popular entertainment, it’s for a quick and dirty lesson on how them grande-derrière monarchists done got what was coming to ’em under the sharp and heavy blade of the libertarian republicans.
What a strange surprise, then, to witness L’Anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke), veteran French director Eric Rohmer’s latest film, and among the most humanistic approaches to doomed aristocracy the cinema has ever seen. Surely, the fact that the film casts the monarchists in a sympathetic light is due in part to the fact that it is based upon Ma vie sous la Révolution, the memoirs of its central character, Lady Grace Elliott, a Scottish expat – and blue-blooded monarchist – who lived in Paris in the late 1700s.
In contrast to the bloodied guillotines and rolling heads sensationalized in many epics about that most turbulent period in French history, The Lady and the Duke is positively, well, revolutionary.
Of course, with Rohmer at the helm, the film is only tangentially about the revolution itself – after all, he is a director who, for the past four decades, has typically been associated with finely observed, high-brow romantic comedies (including two complete series of films – Tales of Four Seasons and Comedies and Proverbs). Here, Rohmer’s preoccupation with manners allows him to approach history from an oblique point of view. It’s political, but mostly with respect to the precise ways Elliott (Lucy Russell) and her longtime paramour, the self-serving Duke of Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), try to adjust to society as it mutates around them.
While Elliott remains a staunch supporter of King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, the Duke sides with the anti-monarchists. Regardless of their differences, though, Elliott and the Duke share an enduring, if repressed, love, and they attempt to deliver each other from Robespierre and his henchmen on several occasions. The machinations and intrigue surrounding this pair make a somewhat slow-moving film continually compelling, creating tension when it’s least expected – even in the sequence where Elliott harbours a fugitive and the film threatens, momentarily, to devolve into French bedroom farce.
Still, the most interesting element of The Lady and the Duke is that it challenges the dominant view of the revolution, offering interesting subtexts concerning power and liberty. By elaborating upon the cruelties of the morally righteous, Rohmer leads us to some unpopular conclusions about democratic uprisings. He makes note of the view that the French Revolution was spurred on by the American Revolution some years earlier, and is also quick to show that democracy has its barbarous side.
The point will not be missed by the attentive viewer – at a time when the U.S. military is engaged in the "liberation" of various peoples across the globe, Rohmer is reminding us to consider the perspective of those who aren’t represented in the dominant socio-political paradigm.
Jean Chrétien could probably tell him that such sentiments are regarded skeptically by many, which makes the subtle elegance of Rohmer’s argument all the more remarkable.
The Lady and the Duke is masterfully constructed from a technical standpoint, too, incorporating digital composites of matte paintings and live-action sequences to capture a realistic background of historical detail.
Here, digital technology works in service to the narrative, as Rohmer captures every nuance of his scrupulously accurate script onscreen – at the same time creating a stylized mise-en-scène that allows for allegorical commentary on the political climate of the present day. |
