There's no one I'd rather watch be British and period than Keira Knightley, but The Duchess suffers from a bit too much modern reimagining. Knightley plays Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Still a teenager when she marries the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), she quickly learns that a marriage she naively believed was based on love is subject to rules of society and propriety she doesn't understand. Georgiana's failure to quickly produce a male heir drives her husband into the arms of various mistresses; the most important of which was the Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell). Foster was brought into the house by the Duke, and the three lived under one roof until Georgiana's death in 1806.
The Duchess is based on a biography of Georgiana by Amanda Foreman, and I can only assume that the book deals with Georgiana's impact on the culture. Saul Dibb's film only gives a mention of Georgiana designing her own dresses, a couple of scenes of her being sketched by journalists, and a glimpse of her campaigning for the Whigs, her lover Charles Gray (Dominic Cooper), and Charles James Fox (Simon McBurney, whom I wanted to see more of as usual). The script glosses over all this and focuses on Georgiana's inability to escape the strictures of the male-dominated society of the day. The Duke, played by Fiennes with an awareness of his own failings he can't articulate, can only relate to Georgiana as a breeder and is drawn to the older Lady Foster's awareness of her own sexuality. I predict Knightley's performance will be underrated here, she never plays Georgiana's awareness of her own situation but keeps the emotional stakes right where they should be. The interlude with Gray is too brief, surely some time could have been spent on what the Duchess might have learned about herself from her friendship with Foster. The Duchess is slightly too long and could have been shaped better, but Knightley, Fiennes, Atwell, and Charlotte Rampling as Georgiana's mother give it a freshness that the British period movie too often lacks.
0 Yorumlar