The Lady & The Duke (2001) Movie Review

Great French filmmaker Eric Rohmer yearns to bring a groundbreaking visual style to his Revolutionary film The Lady and The Duke, but he comes up short. Rohmer sets the late 1700s period film through oil paintings and drawings that reflect the real locales. He then places his actors in digitally through blue screen technology. Many critics and reviewers have praised the effect by Rohmer as a cinematic achievement. I thought that the visuals looked a little bit too fake, like a theatre setting and very surreal. The digitally placed actors, horses, carriages and everything other prop look blocked against the blue screen as if you are watching a old 70s film where the technology was first being used. Rohmer also shot the film on digital video to give it a clear but also at times grainy effect.

The issues in the story itself are what I enjoyed about the film. The film is long, complicated, and all talk, which means most moviegoers will fall asleep through it. The Lady and Duke is like watching a history lesson from a different point of view. From what I found out through research, this is the first French Revolutionary film that shows the point-of-view from the Aristocrats side. The film is based off of the real-life memoirs of Lady Grace Elliott (Russell) and is written for the screen by Rohmer as well. Lady Elliott is a noble woman that has an enduring friendship with her ex-lover, the Duke of Orleans (Dreyfus), who is the cousin to Louis XVI and a leader in Paris. Once the Revolution stirs up, Lady Elliott is faced with many life threatening and intriguing situations. Through there are too many to tell, the story is a historical aspect about one lady's life and decisions for what she believes in. The script itself has hardly any action in it at all; it is all dialogue involving Lady Elliott. The film opens with many boring conversations, that eventually lead to development and structure points for the later of the film. I found the film to finally become interesting when Lady Elliott hides a man under her mattress to protect him from a citizen's search that occurs in her home. There is one dialogue driven scene after another for the rest of the film, which shows the impact of the aristocratic side during the French Revolution.

Eric Rohmer was 80 years old when he began production on The Lady and The Duke. I have not seen any of his other films, but he his hailed as a great French filmmaker. His choices are different, but the whole oil painting backdrop just looked too artificial to me. Rohmer knows how to drive dialogue though, his direction reflects that he is probably a good stage director as well. Outside of other things that battered me about this film, Rohmer's decision to not use a musical score until the last scene of the film was a choice that I didn't understand. I believe music does so much for a film, especially in one that is all spoken, it gives it effectiveness. In my opinion, the film would have been a lot better with some type of musical score in it. The production itself is not top-notch with the editing, but the overall production is elegant to say the least.

Lucy Russell does a wonderful job with her role as Lady Grace Elliott. She captures all of the emotions and qualities that this characters calls for. I was really impressed with her performance, as I was with most of the cast. In addition to, Jean-Claude Dreyfus is solid as the political and powerful Duke of Orleans. The whole cast comes through in this film, but Russell sets the stage with her character being the driving force in every scene.

Watching The Lady and The Duke isn't really like watching a film at all. It is almost like a History Channel special, just with far better qualities. The so-called groundbreaking choices by director Eric Rohmer looked fraudulent to me, but pretty much everyone else who has seen this little French film loves them.