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rushthatspeaksThe Duke of Burgundy (2015) is the British film director Peter Strickland's third feature, after Katalin Varga (2009), which did not have a very wide release, and Berberian Sound Studio (2012), his breakout, which did. Berberian Sound Studio was one of the most enjoyable films I saw in the year it came out, and I was lucky enough shortly after that to visit jinian when she still lived in Seattle, so that we were able to rent Katalin Varga in European-region-only DVD release from the invaluable Scarecrow Video.
Having seen all three of his feature films to date, then, there is a description which I have never seen applied to Strickland in a review or an essay or an article, but which I find readily visible in his work, delightful, and heartwarming:
Peter Strickland is one of the finest feminist filmmakers working at the moment.
Katalin Varga is a bitter little Hungarian murder ballad which has a wrinkle I had not seen on the classical rape-and-revenge plot-- and that is difficult-- a wrinkle based on the woman at the center of it having more agency than everyone else expects of her. Even the audience. Berberian Sound Studio, a complex and multivalent movie, contains among its many subjects a scathing critique of the way female characters are treated in horror movies and a scathing critique of the way female actors are all too often treated by male horror movie directors. I therefore expected the women in The Duke of Burgundy to be three-dimensional people, to be well-rounded characters who are subjects as well as objects, to have their own motivations and minds and methodologies. I got more than I expected, in multiple directions.
I got more than I expected in just about every direction, actually, because I do not go around expecting movies to be as good as The Duke of Burgundy is. Quite simply, they usually aren't.
A thing that has come up in every review of it I have read thus far is that The Duke of Burgundy is probably set in a world in which there are only women.* If this is the case, it's the only film I've seen where that is true. Certainly, every character we see is a woman, every extra, every passerby. This was incontrovertibly necessary, because, and this is one of the points Strickland is making, the story he is telling would change extremely for the audience if anyone performing gender in a currently culturally common male way so much as wandered through the background of one set, for five seconds, once. It would be like an event horizon. The entire film would be pulled after it like a black hole.
And this is because the story Strickland has chosen to tell is about power exchange. This is the best movie I have ever seen about kink. In order for this particular story to work, the characters must have what the audience sees as a basically even level of intrinsic personal power and dominance. They are women because either performing or specifically opting out of some amount of dominant behavior on various occasions is built into current popular conceptions of masculinity. If there were men around in the movie, the audience would be waiting for them to either demonstrate dominance or show that they weren't going to, and, as I said, event horizon, because that is a complete distraction from what is actually going on here.
What is actually going on here is one of the most complicated, beautiful, believable love stories I have encountered since I don't know when. It's also done wonders to help with my phobia of insects.
Cynthia and Evelyn, the central couple, live in a sprawling old European stately house of the sort which is filled with generation upon generation of useful, valuable objects and one bemused-looking Siamese cat. They are both entomologists, and one senses that this is how they met, though Cynthia is more accomplished and known in the field and Evelyn (whose house it is) is more of a wealthy dilettante. The town nearby is ancient stone, cozy in the sunlight, and there are lectures to be given and listened to at the local Institute, which has a great many people who are very interested in butterflies, and also has the kind of antiquated library full of miles of leather bindings which is made for silent research afternoons. They bike everywhere. They wear gorgeously draping medieval-ish cloaks, over the bicycles, and occasionally one or the other waves to the gossipy neighbor who is always out sweeping her yard but never seems to get anywhere.
In private life, Evelyn is mostly Cynthia's maid: cleaning the entire house on her knees, especially the acres of stuffed and mounted butterflies; polishing Cynthia's boots; light laundry, mostly of Cynthia's underwear; intervals of verbal abuse of the cutting more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sort. Sometimes, Evelyn doesn't do her work correctly, and then is punished. In short, they have what I would call a 24/7 D/s relationship, though they do not use very much of the vocabulary.
Everyone I have ever seen discuss 24/7 D/s agrees on one thing: it requires superlative communication skills from all parties. This is the sort of arrangement which only works if being in it is more relaxing and pleasant to those involved than being in other modes. They also need to have a firm sense of their own boundaries, a sense of humor about their own sexual quirks, a forgiving nature because of the things which will inevitably not go well the first time and need to be revised... All the sources agree it requires patience and deep self-knowledge and communication, communication, communication.
Cynthia and Evelyn are about as good at communication as most people I have ever met, and I am sure you can extrapolate. What they do have going for them is that they are passionately, deeply, sincerely, firmly, committedly in love with one another, so in love that it glows off the screen. That is, of course, not enough by itself to make everything go totally smoothly.
So this is a movie that is very deeply about a very specific set of marital problems, which is why it surprised me that most of it is gently hilarious. The cat, for instance, has precisely the correct 'I do not know what these idiots are up to but I am not going to get off the couch because of it' expression at exactly the right moments. Evelyn would love to see Cynthia in a lot of expensive, silky, complicated lingerie, and sometimes Cynthia would rather put her feet up and wear an extraordinarily old pair of flannel pajamas, thank you. It's the kind of humor that arises from people being innately adorable and from life being intrinsically slightly undignified (Cynthia snores, about which Evelyn, one believes, is slightly in despair, because what kind of classy dignified Mistress does that, come on now, and yet reality is just not Venus in Furs and sometimes that is all there is to it).
It's also a movie which is a gentle critique of several genres, which I think is beginning to be Strickland's pattern. A lot of the physical interaction between Cynthia and Evelyn is filmed in a very gauze-y, double-exposure, candlelit European soft-porn style, which is entirely intentional. It looks like one of those movies from the seventies in which there are always artful draperies over everybody's nipples, except that it isn't, because the multiple exposures and soft-focus are used to provide information rather than obscure it. In one particularly impressive shot, blurry focus on a window and a mirror superimposes the image of someone coming up the drive on Evelyn's face in a way that makes it clear that Evelyn will find this person profoundly and unnervingly sexually attractive. In another, the screen is filled with limpid shifting shadows, except for one clear segment, in which we are very explicitly watching the sexual activity that would ordinarily be fuzzed out. I note the film was released unrated. I cannot imagine the MPAA responding to it with anything other than conniptions and writhing and fainting in coils.
The gossipy neighbor, elderly and covered in an apron, straggly white hair full of leaves, turns out, assovay found out afterward, to be played by an actress who became famous in the seventies for exactly the sort of pseudo-lesbian male-gaze-y softcore this isn't. Now, she is almost literally telling the younger folks to get off her lawn. (Have I mentioned how understatedly, wittily relaxing this movie is? I find it so relaxing when someone has thought of all the details.)
And then there are the moths. This movie is covered in moths and in butterflies. There is a long tradition of entomology as metaphor in fiction about female single-gender societies. I think it dates back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but it might be earlier; however, it was taken over by male writers who have used this metaphor, usually of a beehive or anthill, to indicate that cultures consisting only of women must be hive-minded, cold, mercenary, unfeeling, sexless, automatic, lacking in art and finer feelings. There are entire anthologies of sex-war stories like this from the fifties or thereabouts. Joanna Russ wrote an essay about it. It's a common trope.
The moths and butterflies here are carefully shown as, not to put too fine a point on it, beautiful. They are consistently framed to be attractive in everything from the way the light gleams off the cases of mounted butterflies to the gormless flapping of a moth in slow motion coming towards the lantern. They are, almost all of them, fuzzy, shown at a magnification in which the scales on their wings and bodies become soft, touchable, inviting. Evelyn and Cynthia are passionate about them. Everyone in the movie is passionate about them. The Institute lectures are about the tiniest details, things not visible to the naked eye or even necessarily to the microscope. The insects are fragile and fleeting, graceful and visually eloquent. They are arguing the opposite of that sex-war story trope. If this is the metaphor, then all those male females-only-dystopia writers were getting it wrong.
There is a point in the movie where two species of moths are being discussed which are indistinguishable to humans except by their calls. We worry that this might be a metaphor for Cynthia and Evelyn, on the surface so suited, that maybe deep down they are different species. And then, if you are me, you laugh at yourself, because what would it mean if they were different species? It would mean they could not produce offspring. Which nobody in this entire movie cares about. It is not an issue. Maybe they are different species. What matters is how they behave to one another.
I have a literal phobia of insects, and a pretty bad one, which causes me problems in day-to-day life. The ones in this movie are depicted so lovingly that only one scene in it was an issue, a bit in which the screen was so filled up with moths that it would not have been physically possible to pack any more of them in, with context which was emotionally upsetting. Everything else was just fine. If you know me, and how I am about bugs, you will know how impressive a job that is. And yes, I find it has transferred, a little, off the screen afterwards. I want a copy of this movie for many reasons, and that it could teach me not to hate insects so deeply is one of them.**
This is also one of the least objectifying movies I have ever seen. All the women in it dress in what is clearly a mixture of practical, comfortable, and pretty, which comes off as feminine by our culture's lights but not strongly so-- mainly feminine at all because many of the pretty things are things like earrings, which can make a major statement without getting in the way. Cynthia and Evelyn have deep physical chemistry and attraction on a level which does not have much to do with conventional beauty standards. Evelyn has something of a lingerie-and-stockings-and-corsets thing going, but it is shown very clearly that this is about texture and feel, the gleam of light on silk and the translucency of netting, rather than about shaping or controlling the body underneath it all. Even Cynthia's high heels are about the noise they make on the floor, about whether and when Evelyn can hear her approaching. Evelyn does dress Cynthia up more than Cynthia would prefer-- that kind of lingerie takes an effort to wear. But Cynthia in her flannel pajamas and thrown-together hair-bun and bedroom slippers is as lovely to us as Cynthia is in her high-femme pro-Domme tweed miniskirt and nylon seamed stockings and stilettos and lace blouse. The camera, the viewpoint, does not make a distinction. Evelyn does, but mostly because she really hates those pajamas.
Finally, I urge you to stay for the ending credits, and to read them, because they are extraordinarily entertaining in and of themselves. (The titular Duke, by the way, is a butterfly.)
I left the theatre smiling. I smile when I think about this movie. It is an embarrassment of riches. I have no idea what Peter Strickland will come up with next, but I will be there for it. If I see a better film this year, I will be very surprised indeed.
* I am uncertain about this, because the worldbuilding is not explicitly discussed onscreen (and why should it be, as there is no in-world reason to do so). I think there may be a very few men, because there are several scenes in a crowded lecture hall, which is filled with seated women and with seated mannequins dressed in female clothing. The mannequins are outnumbered by the women perhaps one hundred to one. The only reason I can think of for having them there is if there are men in those seats, who have been visually replaced by mannequins so that they are demarcated only by their own absence. Which, just, bless.
** Literally twenty minutes after making this entry I found out I have clothes moths. The lesson here is NEVER GIVE ANY GROUND.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
jinian when she still lived in Seattle, so that we were able to rent Katalin Varga in European-region-only DVD release from the invaluable Scarecrow Video.Having seen all three of his feature films to date, then, there is a description which I have never seen applied to Strickland in a review or an essay or an article, but which I find readily visible in his work, delightful, and heartwarming:
Peter Strickland is one of the finest feminist filmmakers working at the moment.
Katalin Varga is a bitter little Hungarian murder ballad which has a wrinkle I had not seen on the classical rape-and-revenge plot-- and that is difficult-- a wrinkle based on the woman at the center of it having more agency than everyone else expects of her. Even the audience. Berberian Sound Studio, a complex and multivalent movie, contains among its many subjects a scathing critique of the way female characters are treated in horror movies and a scathing critique of the way female actors are all too often treated by male horror movie directors. I therefore expected the women in The Duke of Burgundy to be three-dimensional people, to be well-rounded characters who are subjects as well as objects, to have their own motivations and minds and methodologies. I got more than I expected, in multiple directions.
I got more than I expected in just about every direction, actually, because I do not go around expecting movies to be as good as The Duke of Burgundy is. Quite simply, they usually aren't.
A thing that has come up in every review of it I have read thus far is that The Duke of Burgundy is probably set in a world in which there are only women.* If this is the case, it's the only film I've seen where that is true. Certainly, every character we see is a woman, every extra, every passerby. This was incontrovertibly necessary, because, and this is one of the points Strickland is making, the story he is telling would change extremely for the audience if anyone performing gender in a currently culturally common male way so much as wandered through the background of one set, for five seconds, once. It would be like an event horizon. The entire film would be pulled after it like a black hole.
And this is because the story Strickland has chosen to tell is about power exchange. This is the best movie I have ever seen about kink. In order for this particular story to work, the characters must have what the audience sees as a basically even level of intrinsic personal power and dominance. They are women because either performing or specifically opting out of some amount of dominant behavior on various occasions is built into current popular conceptions of masculinity. If there were men around in the movie, the audience would be waiting for them to either demonstrate dominance or show that they weren't going to, and, as I said, event horizon, because that is a complete distraction from what is actually going on here.
What is actually going on here is one of the most complicated, beautiful, believable love stories I have encountered since I don't know when. It's also done wonders to help with my phobia of insects.
Cynthia and Evelyn, the central couple, live in a sprawling old European stately house of the sort which is filled with generation upon generation of useful, valuable objects and one bemused-looking Siamese cat. They are both entomologists, and one senses that this is how they met, though Cynthia is more accomplished and known in the field and Evelyn (whose house it is) is more of a wealthy dilettante. The town nearby is ancient stone, cozy in the sunlight, and there are lectures to be given and listened to at the local Institute, which has a great many people who are very interested in butterflies, and also has the kind of antiquated library full of miles of leather bindings which is made for silent research afternoons. They bike everywhere. They wear gorgeously draping medieval-ish cloaks, over the bicycles, and occasionally one or the other waves to the gossipy neighbor who is always out sweeping her yard but never seems to get anywhere.
In private life, Evelyn is mostly Cynthia's maid: cleaning the entire house on her knees, especially the acres of stuffed and mounted butterflies; polishing Cynthia's boots; light laundry, mostly of Cynthia's underwear; intervals of verbal abuse of the cutting more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sort. Sometimes, Evelyn doesn't do her work correctly, and then is punished. In short, they have what I would call a 24/7 D/s relationship, though they do not use very much of the vocabulary.
Everyone I have ever seen discuss 24/7 D/s agrees on one thing: it requires superlative communication skills from all parties. This is the sort of arrangement which only works if being in it is more relaxing and pleasant to those involved than being in other modes. They also need to have a firm sense of their own boundaries, a sense of humor about their own sexual quirks, a forgiving nature because of the things which will inevitably not go well the first time and need to be revised... All the sources agree it requires patience and deep self-knowledge and communication, communication, communication.
Cynthia and Evelyn are about as good at communication as most people I have ever met, and I am sure you can extrapolate. What they do have going for them is that they are passionately, deeply, sincerely, firmly, committedly in love with one another, so in love that it glows off the screen. That is, of course, not enough by itself to make everything go totally smoothly.
So this is a movie that is very deeply about a very specific set of marital problems, which is why it surprised me that most of it is gently hilarious. The cat, for instance, has precisely the correct 'I do not know what these idiots are up to but I am not going to get off the couch because of it' expression at exactly the right moments. Evelyn would love to see Cynthia in a lot of expensive, silky, complicated lingerie, and sometimes Cynthia would rather put her feet up and wear an extraordinarily old pair of flannel pajamas, thank you. It's the kind of humor that arises from people being innately adorable and from life being intrinsically slightly undignified (Cynthia snores, about which Evelyn, one believes, is slightly in despair, because what kind of classy dignified Mistress does that, come on now, and yet reality is just not Venus in Furs and sometimes that is all there is to it).
It's also a movie which is a gentle critique of several genres, which I think is beginning to be Strickland's pattern. A lot of the physical interaction between Cynthia and Evelyn is filmed in a very gauze-y, double-exposure, candlelit European soft-porn style, which is entirely intentional. It looks like one of those movies from the seventies in which there are always artful draperies over everybody's nipples, except that it isn't, because the multiple exposures and soft-focus are used to provide information rather than obscure it. In one particularly impressive shot, blurry focus on a window and a mirror superimposes the image of someone coming up the drive on Evelyn's face in a way that makes it clear that Evelyn will find this person profoundly and unnervingly sexually attractive. In another, the screen is filled with limpid shifting shadows, except for one clear segment, in which we are very explicitly watching the sexual activity that would ordinarily be fuzzed out. I note the film was released unrated. I cannot imagine the MPAA responding to it with anything other than conniptions and writhing and fainting in coils.
The gossipy neighbor, elderly and covered in an apron, straggly white hair full of leaves, turns out, as
sovay found out afterward, to be played by an actress who became famous in the seventies for exactly the sort of pseudo-lesbian male-gaze-y softcore this isn't. Now, she is almost literally telling the younger folks to get off her lawn. (Have I mentioned how understatedly, wittily relaxing this movie is? I find it so relaxing when someone has thought of all the details.)And then there are the moths. This movie is covered in moths and in butterflies. There is a long tradition of entomology as metaphor in fiction about female single-gender societies. I think it dates back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but it might be earlier; however, it was taken over by male writers who have used this metaphor, usually of a beehive or anthill, to indicate that cultures consisting only of women must be hive-minded, cold, mercenary, unfeeling, sexless, automatic, lacking in art and finer feelings. There are entire anthologies of sex-war stories like this from the fifties or thereabouts. Joanna Russ wrote an essay about it. It's a common trope.
The moths and butterflies here are carefully shown as, not to put too fine a point on it, beautiful. They are consistently framed to be attractive in everything from the way the light gleams off the cases of mounted butterflies to the gormless flapping of a moth in slow motion coming towards the lantern. They are, almost all of them, fuzzy, shown at a magnification in which the scales on their wings and bodies become soft, touchable, inviting. Evelyn and Cynthia are passionate about them. Everyone in the movie is passionate about them. The Institute lectures are about the tiniest details, things not visible to the naked eye or even necessarily to the microscope. The insects are fragile and fleeting, graceful and visually eloquent. They are arguing the opposite of that sex-war story trope. If this is the metaphor, then all those male females-only-dystopia writers were getting it wrong.
There is a point in the movie where two species of moths are being discussed which are indistinguishable to humans except by their calls. We worry that this might be a metaphor for Cynthia and Evelyn, on the surface so suited, that maybe deep down they are different species. And then, if you are me, you laugh at yourself, because what would it mean if they were different species? It would mean they could not produce offspring. Which nobody in this entire movie cares about. It is not an issue. Maybe they are different species. What matters is how they behave to one another.
I have a literal phobia of insects, and a pretty bad one, which causes me problems in day-to-day life. The ones in this movie are depicted so lovingly that only one scene in it was an issue, a bit in which the screen was so filled up with moths that it would not have been physically possible to pack any more of them in, with context which was emotionally upsetting. Everything else was just fine. If you know me, and how I am about bugs, you will know how impressive a job that is. And yes, I find it has transferred, a little, off the screen afterwards. I want a copy of this movie for many reasons, and that it could teach me not to hate insects so deeply is one of them.**
This is also one of the least objectifying movies I have ever seen. All the women in it dress in what is clearly a mixture of practical, comfortable, and pretty, which comes off as feminine by our culture's lights but not strongly so-- mainly feminine at all because many of the pretty things are things like earrings, which can make a major statement without getting in the way. Cynthia and Evelyn have deep physical chemistry and attraction on a level which does not have much to do with conventional beauty standards. Evelyn has something of a lingerie-and-stockings-and-corsets thing going, but it is shown very clearly that this is about texture and feel, the gleam of light on silk and the translucency of netting, rather than about shaping or controlling the body underneath it all. Even Cynthia's high heels are about the noise they make on the floor, about whether and when Evelyn can hear her approaching. Evelyn does dress Cynthia up more than Cynthia would prefer-- that kind of lingerie takes an effort to wear. But Cynthia in her flannel pajamas and thrown-together hair-bun and bedroom slippers is as lovely to us as Cynthia is in her high-femme pro-Domme tweed miniskirt and nylon seamed stockings and stilettos and lace blouse. The camera, the viewpoint, does not make a distinction. Evelyn does, but mostly because she really hates those pajamas.
Finally, I urge you to stay for the ending credits, and to read them, because they are extraordinarily entertaining in and of themselves. (The titular Duke, by the way, is a butterfly.)
I left the theatre smiling. I smile when I think about this movie. It is an embarrassment of riches. I have no idea what Peter Strickland will come up with next, but I will be there for it. If I see a better film this year, I will be very surprised indeed.
* I am uncertain about this, because the worldbuilding is not explicitly discussed onscreen (and why should it be, as there is no in-world reason to do so). I think there may be a very few men, because there are several scenes in a crowded lecture hall, which is filled with seated women and with seated mannequins dressed in female clothing. The mannequins are outnumbered by the women perhaps one hundred to one. The only reason I can think of for having them there is if there are men in those seats, who have been visually replaced by mannequins so that they are demarcated only by their own absence. Which, just, bless.
** Literally twenty minutes after making this entry I found out I have clothes moths. The lesson here is NEVER GIVE ANY GROUND.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
