The Lady and the Duke (2001)
Average Rating: 6.6/10
Reviews Counted: 70
Fresh: 50 | Rotten: 20
Visually stunning, The Lady and the Duke uses current technology to elegantly bring the past to life.
Average Rating: 7/10
Critic Reviews: 27
Fresh: 22 | Rotten: 5
Visually stunning, The Lady and the Duke uses current technology to elegantly bring the past to life.
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Average Rating: 3.4/5
User Ratings: 1,224
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Movie Info
Having finished his acclaimed cinematic quartet "Contes des quatre saisons," legendary filmmaker Eric Rohmer takes DV camera in hand to recreate this idiosyncratic period piece adapted from the Grace Elliot memoirs. Concerned with faithfully evoking 18th century France, Rohmer uses two strategies -- using only eyewitness accounts of the times and avoiding all external settings, arguing that Paris now is a completely different city than it was during revolutionary times. The story revolves around
Cast
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Lucy Russell
Grace Elliott -
Jean-Claude Dreyfus
Philippe Duke of Orlean... -
François Marthouret
Dumourier -
Léonard Cobiant
Champcenetz -
Caroline Morin
Nanon -
Alain Libolt
Duke de Biron -
Helena Dubeil
Madame Meyler -
Daniel Tarrare
Justin the porter -
Charlotte Véry
Pulcherie the cook -
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All Critics (78) | Top Critics (30) | Fresh (50) | Rotten (20) | DVD (5)
Leave it to Rohmer, now 82, to find a way to bend current technique to the service of a vision of the past that is faithful to both architectural glories and commanding open spaces of the city as it was more than two centuries ago.
Top CriticSeldom has the elegant past of 18th century royal life married modern filmmaking with the grace and sophistication of Eric Rohmer's L'anglaise et le duc.
Nothing short of a technical marvel and a ravishing movie to look at.
Whenever the subtleties of political morality get a bit overbearing, there's a respite in the painterly streets of Paris, where, we are reminded, the past was another city, strange and resistant to present-day adornments.
I loved the look of this film.
A highly stylized, willfully artificial experiment, yet it uses its artifice to bring a major distant event thrillingly to life.
Though not one of Rohmer best films, it's worth seeing for the acting and the dialogue which magnify the glory of the French language. Amazingly, at 81, Rohmer continues to be productive; rejection of film by Cannes Festival stirred controversy in 2001
Who would have thought that in the year of Spider-Man and Attack of the Clones, the year's most innovative use of special effects would come in a film about the French Revolution?
Rohmer's playful style is often good fun. And Russell is especially compelling. But honestly, it's fairly hard going.
At 135-minutes, this stream-of-facts lecture trembles into the trenches of monotony without the detraction of technology.
My problem with The Lady and the Duke is not Rohmer's ostensibly pro-Royalist politics, but his now reactionary aesthetics.
Rohmer's novel, exhilarating and elegant work with painted scenery and digital equipment is a revelation. But this work is stuck in a film in which the foreground action is sleep-inducing by comparison.
Not only has Rohmer reinvented the costume drama with The Lady and the Duke, he makes the case that the genre is worth reinventing.
Rohmer makes a gracious, if occasionally tedious, effort to dress the French Revolution in digitally rendered scenes that bespeak the period perfectly.
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Foreign Titles
- Die Lady und der Herzog - L´Anglaise et le Duc (DE)
- The Lady and the Duke (L'anglaise et le duc) (CA)
