[critical] THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

Farea love with the cinema that we love, here is a fantasy shared by many moviegoers. Move it from the sometimes frustrating to the viewer and cross the screen to participate in the feast of the senses. The condition of the lovers, move to one lover. It’s this fantasy that seems to govern the desires of Peter Strickland throughout his career; love of a kind of cinema bis-seventies, he chose to use his talent of aesthete to extend our time, the pleasure (and often guilty) of his images, between anguish and eroticism. In the manner of a Tarantino lost in his daydreams of adolescents, Strickland puts his emotions of fan service-a forgotten piece of cinema that was playing more on our senses than on our grey cells, of the Italian giallo to horror british through thrillers erotic Spanish influences that can be found here under the incarnations of the two main characters, almost no witches or enchanters that women.

The story summed up in a line and expands, yet in the same way as the image distorts, sometimes, as if the temporality of the movie was as intangible as that of a daydream : Cynthia and Evelyn find themselves in a large English manor house to indulge in their games of domination; Cynthia the dominant, Evelyn the dominated…until the mechanics of their rituals derailed and that the roles become less clear. If the british director claims at the time of the transgression of a Paul Morrissey, and the noble mood of the productions of Hammer, the film betrays especially the influence of Jess Franco , who in the seventies turned to each of the heroines of his films, horror or psychological terror in icon erotic. The icons of Strickland reflects this approach of an aesthetic of sexuality, disturbing, venomous, but also dazzling brightness, summery even, to believe the caresses solar lamps that illuminated the wings of butterflies above the streams, or remodel the skin through the windows of the beautiful house.

This ongoing confusion between the lights of the outdoor stages and the shadows of the interior scenes, is perfectly served by a photography sublime which appears to be both a magic trick and a naturalistic observation on the two human specimens and female, studied as well as are the thousands of butterflies that haunt the film. Music pop-folk, naïve, and dreamy blends of this visual work all over, in slow motion and reflections liars; and the whole may seem poseur, and quickly tiring, but all these tricks show and the pageantry, and the constant need of staging including Cynthia and Evelyn find themselves trapped, overwhelmed by a sexuality that is taking more and more place in their lives, and a condition for gradually all of their emotions and their feelings. Contrary to what is written in some articles dedicated to the film, there is no question here of a sado-masochism in vogue and all its decorum a nothing grotesque; the lesbian couple sharing fantasies of domination, and the nuance is important since it justifies the aesthetics and the mentality of the bourgeois; the humiliations are those of a lady of the house towards his home, and the punishment more trashs take place off-fields.

“An intimate drama about sexuality and love, imagined in the form of a dream, stunning beauty.”

A rarity in the film, the cast is 100% female as if the filmmaker had wanted to evacuate completely the question of male dominance in society and in the heterosexual couple. The two followers of the sexual games being women, they take and each in turn the role of the dominatrix and the submissive, the strong and the weak, and thus appear to be both willing victims of a spell, manifesting through the hordes of beetles, and the staging is comparable to that of the fantastic films that are dear to Strickland. These biases allow the viewer to ask themselves the same questions that the protagonists on what they really want, what defines them most : is it their desire or their impulses ? The filmmaker has managed to capture the paradox of a couple who believes in a first time, happy and free thanks to a sexuality nonconformist, but which includes gradually that the codes that they themselves have chosen to imprison them in reports artificial. What is there more beautiful and more strong in the poetry of THE DUKE OF BURGUNDYis that her heroines are not doomed to see their history of trouble and little by little change into a nightmare; they have the ability to find the sincerity, the happiness and the freedom in their love, they are both sovereign of the dream that we share.

The other outputs of the June 17, 2015

VICE-VERSA, MUSTANG, CAVANNA, SPY, THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY, The great ESCAPE, VALLEY OF LOVE, THE RESISTANCE OF The AIR, THE BATTLE OF THE MOUNTAIN OF the TIGER, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, etc