A costume drama with Keira Knightley is not normally my cup of tea, and upon taking my seat unease turned to a sense of doom when the film opened with a row of fops and fopettes, and Keira drawling: "Lord Thomas, Lord Henry, haw haw haw." Two hours of this and one could start to see the benefits of the guillotine.
The story begins in 1774 at the Spencer family country estate. The Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) is negotiating a marriage to 17-year-old Lady Georgiana Spencer (Knightley), while outside she flirts with Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper, the insufferably confident teenager from The History Boys).
The duke is cold-blooded, devoid of feeling and cruel without revelling in his cruelty. "I'm not particularly adept at expressing myself on a personal note," he says during a rare moment of openness. Though vigorously heterosexual -_in fact, so much so that he'd appear on the sex offenders register were he alive today - he goes through the wedding night ceremony with as much joy as one takes filling in the year's tax receipts.
Not that proceedings, either sensual or emotional, are much fun for the duchess either. "He never talks to me. He isn't interested in anything," she complains to her mother (in fairness, he is quite interested in his dogs).
On the plus side, as wife of the country's leading landowner she's thrust into the position of London society alpha female, and at the forefront of every fashionable cause. Handsome men flock to her side, and artists draw sketches of her wherever she goes - and yet she's stuck in a cold, loveless marriage with an emotionally retarded, adulterous husband, and with only her family, the Spencers, to comfort her.
Clearly there are parallels with someone rather closer to our time, especially when you consider Knightley's swimmer's physique and Sloaney drawl (Georgiana was also an ancestor of Sarah Ferguson and her brother was a direct forebear of the Queen of Hearts herself).
Like Diana, Georgiana mixed her role as trendsetter and figurehead for fashionable causes. Diana wanted us to all open our hearts and cry a bit more; Georgiana's political crowd wanted to abolish slavery and give the middle class the vote.
For the duke, despite being the sort of English aristocrat who would order the razing of an Irish village between courses, supports the Whigs, and entertains the likes of the radical Charles James Fox.
The duchess takes Mr Fox up on his plan to only give votes to property owners and says if she had the vote she'd extend the franchise to all men. "Freedom in moderation," he says, admonishing her for her dangerously radical and anachronistic views.
In Bath the duchess sees something of man's inhumanity to woman when she strikes up a friendship with Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell), who is homeless and denied access to her three sons, and who also sports some rather horrendous bruising around her neck. (Lady Foster, incidentally, was a Hervey, another dysfunctional aristocratic family whose descendants still fill today's gossip columns.)
The duchess takes in her new friend, but her own marriage is failing on account of her inability to bear sons, and she takes more comfort in the political party scene. Through Fox she becomes friends with the playwright Richard Sheridan, who writes a mocking play about her marriage, School for Scandal, and she campaigns for the Whigs (leading to much satire from the 18th century's equivalent of the Sun and the Mirror). She also meets Fox's protégé, the dashing Lord Grey. Though she is chaste and self-restrained, her husband is not so considerate, and pounces on everything in a bodice, including Lady Foster. When the duchess suggests that, since he has set up with her best friend, she could have an affair with Lord Grey, he shows his vicious side.
Yet the underlying message is that everyone is a prisoner of their place. Lady Bess betrayed her so she could use the duke to get her children back, while even the cold duke is a victim (in the loosest, Diana-esque sense) of his social position - the demand that he produce an heir, and the need to keep away from gossip and scandal.
This is Fiennes's genius: to play a cold fish who acts outrageously but is not evil; as such, he is the best actor in the world at playing morally ambiguous characters who wear their moral ambiguity lightly.
Duchess was based on Georgiana, Amanda Foreman's Whitbread-winning biography, published in the post-Diana glare of 1998. The film feels like it was originally conceived as an allegory for modern fame that developed a life of its own, which is to the film-maker's credit, as is the strong script, lack of ancien régime clichés, and choice of Fiennes. Duchess is a subtle, well-acted film that even fop-ophobes will find enjoyable. |
