Tough call if you’re a movie marketer: Do you sell The Duke of Burgundy as a story of a professor who specializes in the study of moths and butterflies, or a tale of a lesbian S&M role-playing relationship? Of course this is a trick question, because this movie is both. It has plenty to interest lepidopterists and kinksters alike.
The film is mostly set in and around a beautiful old house in the countryside (Hungarian, though the film’s in English). We first meet the professor, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), as she cruelly bosses around Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), a younger woman who appears to be her maid. It turns out this ritual of humiliation is not only mutually accepted, but mostly dictated by Evelyn, who enjoys being punished. She insists that they repeat the same game-playing stories, while Cynthia grows more disenchanted with these rules. She has the house and the career, but she looks terrified of losing her pretty young companion, and goes through the paces accordingly. Occasionally we sit in on lectures that appear to involve an all-female club of moth experts, a quirk that confirms how much this movie is its own airtight, self-contained system.
Writer/director Peter Strickland, whose previous film was the devilishly clever Berberian
Sound Studio, is nearly flawless at creating that system. On the one hand, his movie is an incredibly handsome homage to a certain kind of arty erotic picture from the ’70s (the opening credits are wonderfully antique), yet he shows no nudity and generates little salacious excitement. The two actresses are completely locked into this world, never winking at the camera or losing the human vulnerability behind the unconventional, uh, “lifestyle.” At one point the movie pauses for a trippy sequence that directly quotes Stan Brakhage’s classic of experimental cinema, Mothlight (for which the filmmaker pasted bits of real moths onto the film reel), but with a distinctly sexual kick. Amid this hothouse atmosphere, something roots The Duke of Burgundy in a universal subject. However weirdly it might present itself, and whatever Cynthia and Evelyn’s S&M tastes might be, the relationship issues between the two women are pretty mundane: One is getting bored; one is needier than the other; one has money and the other has youth. Dressing these everyday anxieties in bondage gear gives the movie an undercurrent of droll humor, which becomes part of its sneaky appeal.
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THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY Opens Fri., Feb. 6 at SIFF Cinema Uptown and Film Center. Not rated. 101 minutes.
