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The Lady and the Duke (2001)

tomatometer

71

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.

81

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.

audience

55

liked it
Average Rating: 3.4/5
User Ratings: 1,224

My Rating

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

PG-13,

Art House & International, Drama

Eric Rohmer

Oct 1, 2002

$0.1M

Sony Pictures Classics - Official Site External Icon

Cast

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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.

September 27, 2002
Detroit News
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Seldom 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.

August 2, 2002 Full Review Source: Miami Herald
Miami Herald
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Nothing short of a technical marvel and a ravishing movie to look at.

July 26, 2002 Full Review Source: Toronto Star
Toronto Star
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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.

July 26, 2002 Full Review Source: Globe and Mail
Globe and Mail
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I loved the look of this film.

July 20, 2002 Full Review Source: Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
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A highly stylized, willfully artificial experiment, yet it uses its artifice to bring a major distant event thrillingly to life.

June 7, 2002 Full Review Source: Sacramento Bee
Sacramento Bee
Top Critic IconTop Critic

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

February 14, 2007 Full Review Source: EmanuelLevy.Com
EmanuelLevy.Com

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?

January 15, 2005
Looking Closer

Rohmer's playful style is often good fun. And Russell is especially compelling. But honestly, it's fairly hard going.

February 8, 2004 Full Review Source: Film Threat
Film Threat

At 135-minutes, this stream-of-facts lecture trembles into the trenches of monotony without the detraction of technology.

December 22, 2003 Full Review Source: eFilmCritic.com
eFilmCritic.com

My problem with The Lady and the Duke is not Rohmer's ostensibly pro-Royalist politics, but his now reactionary aesthetics.

October 5, 2002 Full Review Source: PopMatters
PopMatters

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.

October 3, 2002
Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Canada)

Not only has Rohmer reinvented the costume drama with The Lady and the Duke, he makes the case that the genre is worth reinventing.

August 3, 2002 Full Review Source: eye WEEKLY
eye WEEKLY

Rohmer makes a gracious, if occasionally tedious, effort to dress the French Revolution in digitally rendered scenes that bespeak the period perfectly.

August 2, 2002
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Audience Reviews for The Lady and the Duke

Period piece misses the mark. The film makers probably realized it was a disaster but knew someone would always be interested in period pieces..so they took their chances. Not worth the effort to find.
April 15, 2010
John Ballantine

Super Reviewer

After having exclusively viewed contemporary cinema over the past 3 weeks and all the inherently "unsure" cinema that such an exercise involves, watching the total and complete confidence of old man Rohmer was like mana from heaven. Rohmer finally lends his conservatism to didactic political prominence with this vicious attack on the horrors of the French Revolution. It owes everything to Rossellini's historical films, and, sadly, Rohmer is probably the only director today still looking directly to Rossellini's historical films for inspiration.
August 14, 2009
GringoTex
GringoTex Johnson
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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)
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