Too bad cellar isn't around.
On Sunday night we saw the latest Rohmer, "The Lady and the Duke" at the New York Film Festival.
Depicting the French Revolution from any angle is a risky prospect, but Rohmer seems to deserve the criticism (in france) that he sympathizes with royalists with this one. I tried very hard to defend him, reaching one could say, for examples in which Rohmer subtley mocked the proud, noble, scottish aristocrat Grace Elliott, the heroine of this film, but my husband flattened each attempt. In the end, I had to admit, that Rohmer portrayed the aristocracy as brave, eloquent and virtuous, and the revolutionaries as village idiots-- ill-mannered, bumbling fools outdoing each other in their fanaticism.
I discovered, in the process, that my husband is a closet royalist, an accusation he once levelled at one of my professors, Pierre Rosanvallon, because he reminded him physically of Louis XVI.
I wished for Grace to be beheaded by the end because her haughtiness and self-righteousness was insufferable. My husband found her 'cute'.
What you are supposed to take away from the film is "the ironic play on character shaped by environment". When Grace sends for her lady-in-waiting to fetch her a sachet of lavander to protect her delicate nostrils from the stench of the french prison, this irony is at its best. (we almost got divorced over this issue)
What is also noteworthy is the digital backdrop in which the effect of reproducing pre-revolutionary France was achieved. It was like superimposing real life, moving figures on a stagnant oil painting, but very cool in a way. At eighty-one, Rohmer is still reinventing his style and outdoing himself. I recommend you see this movie in a theater, not on video.
