The Lady and the Duke

Estreava há 20 anos no Festival de Toronto. Todo mundo sabe que o Rohmer era reacinha, mas fazer um filme sob o ponto de vista da nobreza coitadinha é o fim da picada, tinham mais de cortar a cabeça desses filhos da puta mesmo. Por outro lado, tecnicamente esse filme é um desbunde, filmado digitalmente, com vasto uso de chroma key que deixou o filme parecendo quadros em movimento do período da Revolução Francesa, a gente acaba perdoando reacionarismo por conta da beleza como o faz. MKO

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Lovely piece of film-making, which should help us understand how we think about history.

While the artificiality of the backdrops serves to remind the viewer that the film does not pretend to represent History but rather to present one perspective on historical events, the complexity and subtlety of the dialogue has a more genuine ring of truth than just about any supposedly "realistic" portrayal of revolutionary France. Conveys the wildness and fearsomeness of the torrent of events better than most, by concentrating on the performative relation between words and deeds.

"The Lady and the Duke is Eric Rohmer's economical antidote to the bloated costume drama." - Ed Gonzalez

Rohmer, practically the poster boy for Verbal Cinema, tries his hand at a special-effects movie. That's not to say that it's any less talky, stilted, static, and stagy than Rohmer's norm. The effects are strange but go down easier, though, than the digital-video image in the non-CG interior scenes: the anemic color, the flattened forms and perspectives, the literally chintzy surface of the image.

Good Movie

Be advised that this movie is a huge lie. Grace Elliott was not a noble; she was a courtesan a la Lola Montes. (Max Ophuls's Montes movie is the same kind of lie.) That being said, it's still well-made enough to be worth seeing, as one woman's struggles amidst the French Revolution. (Did Rohmer know? Or is her memoir also a load of crap?) Also featuring this weird technique in which no outdoor locations or sets are used; the actors are superimposed against CGI backdrops with bad matting