Recently we’ve seen a film about BDSM driven by dead-eyed commercial imperative. Peter Strickland’s new film, The Duke of Burgundy, is different: it is a labour of love, whereas Fifty Shades of Grey was a labour of money.
The Duke is an extravagantly artificial creation, all about fetish, kink and the sussuration of an insect’s wings. The opening credits announce that it features “perfume by Je Suis Gizella”. Attempts to Google this product exposed my failure to get the joke. Or maybe Strickland discovered a stockpile of obscure scent that ceased production in 1972. A nice touch, though – as if early silent movies had credited the music they played on-set to get actors in the mood.
This is the story of a love affair based on sadomasochistic role-play, with the choreography of sub and dom and the traditional paradox about who is really in charge. It is a passion based on a secret theatre of humiliation and pain. But what happens when one of the parties falls out of love and wants to end the affair, and the real humiliation and real pain come into play?
The movie inhales the lost aroma of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Joseph Losey movies such as The Servant and Accident, and also looks like an agile homage to the arthouse eroticism of Walerian Borowczyk at his most preposterous. The presence here of Monica Swinn, once the star of 70s exploitation pictures by Jess Franco, indicates another debt. A closeup shot of stockings being pulled on, with a rapt observer in the background, may even have been influenced by the famous poster for The Graduate.
Strickland’s opening title-design is well-observed pastiche, but the rest of the film is something other than that. If Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had set out to spoof early 70s Euro-softcore, it might have come complete with faux-scratches on the print and digitally faked soundtrack crackles. Strickland is not sending anything up: he is doing it for real.
The Duke of Burgundy was shot in Hungary, where the locations and exotic exteriors stand for a place as abstract as the site of a Grimm fairytale. His stars are Danish and Italian: Sidse Babett Knudsen (from TV’s Borgen) and Chiara D’Anna (whose previous credit is from Strickland’s previous film, Berberian Sound Studio). The dialogue is in English, and their line-readings are sometimes a bit eccentric – was dubbing involved? – but intriguingly so.
Evelyn (D’Anna) calls on Cynthia (Knudsen) every day to clean her house and wash her underwear, enduring Cynthia’s icy haughtiness; Evelyn demurely accepts punishments in the bathroom if her work is not up to scratch – encounters that are continued in the bedroom. In the same submissive spirit, rather like an assistant or grad student, she will accompany Cynthia to a strange lecture series on lepidopterology, which is Cynthia’s passion. Strickland introduces a new and even weirder dimension to this situation by bringing in another character, a carpenter (played by Fatma Mohamed) who specialises in bespoke items to intensify transgressive sexual pleasure. But Strickland shows us backstage discontent leaking into the theatrical display: Evelyn wants to be treated ever more ruthlessly – like Proust’s Baron de Charlus – and is beginning to suspect that Cynthia’s heart is not really in it any more.
There are no men in this world, which partly accounts for the intensity of the atmosphere, and Strickland takes us on a freaky, Angela Carter-ish fantasy trip, in which genitalia becomes the heart of a lush but disturbing forest bristling with butterflies. It is all done with a poise and high seriousness that still contains a squeak of humour, at an insect-type frequency.
And The Duke is very funny, though I had the slight sense that the sheer artistry means that both the erotic charge and the comedy are sometimes fractionally less potent than they might be. It is quite different from Steven Shainberg’s Secretary, in which transgressive sex was all the more potent because it involved characters who looked like people from the real world – although Cynthia and Evelyn are unreal in a more rewarding way than the daytime soapers Christian Grey and Ana Steele.
What Strickland is offering is arguably more refined: a lucid dream of sexual adventure. The title refers to a type of butterfly much loved by Cynthia. To paraphrase Muhammad Ali, this film floats like one, but stings as well.
