Longing for a sadomasochism movie that doesn’t blur boundaries? Try Peter Strickland’s dreamy The Duke of Burgundy.
Sidse Babett Knudsen in The Duke of Burgundy.
Sundance Selects
OK: There's no Christian Grey in The Duke of Burgundy, which, if you're longing for more of Jamie Dornan's taut abs, intense gaze, and unparalleled ability to keep a straight face while delivering lines like "I'm fifty shades of fucked up," is a drawback. There are actually no men at all in the movie, which takes place in a luscious, ivy-covered, all-female idyll where its characters spend their days studying butterflies and engaging in sadomasochistic roleplay. But where the E.L. James juggernaut blurs boundaries between the power games its characters dabble in during sex and their larger relationship, The Duke of Burgundy boldly explores the way the two can have little to do with each other. One of its lovers may be on top in the bedroom, but she's not in control of the relationship as a whole, and as the film makes wryly but also poignantly clear, sexual needs and emotional ones aren't the same thing.
The Duke of Burgundy was written and directed by Peter Strickland, a British filmmaker whose last feature, Berberian Sound Studio, was about a sound engineer falling to pieces while working on a giallo picture. Strickland's new film is an homage to another '70s genre, the Euro sexploitation flick, with its characters living in a world of golden afternoons and dark, luxurious rooms through which they saunter in enviable buttoned-up outfits, always poised to let their pinned-back hair come tumbling down and fall into a steamy clinch. No one seems to have a job except the woman who builds specialized bondage beds. It's a lushly filmed, fanciful realm of ritualized submission and dominance, in which the older Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen, star of the terrific Danish series Borgen) plays power games with her younger and seemingly more naive lover, Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna).
Sundance Selects
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