A Duchess's progress

Rating: 7/10 (16 August 2009)

Just another bodice-ripping costume drama...? Well, perhaps, but this latest entrant into a historically crowded field has such a strong narrative (based on a true story, so the legend has it), that taking into account the customary high production values this type of film usually engenders, the final result is a quality movie, with contemporary resonance as issues of child access, infidelity, class division, male-dominated relationship issues and a little bit of celebrity populism and more are presented for our delectation.
The high-society-at-play opening on the lawns of England is merely the entrée to the more serious sport of class politics as aspirant mother Charlotte Rampling thrusts her innocently ambitious 17 year old daughter Keira Knightley into an arranged marriage with the older, colder Duke of Devonshire, old dour-face Ralph Fiennes, rich beyond belief and a major power in contemporary Whig politics whose sole expectation of his new bride is to sire a son to prolong his family line.
Knightley's and to a lesser extent Fiennes' characters' stormy progress from this starting point to a sort of understood peace at the end is effectively the story in a nutshell, taking in, as it does, the affairs of subsidiary characters who cross their paths, like the Duchess's soul-mate, Lady Bess who will go to any lengths, including the bedroom, to win the Duke's influence in getting her infant sons returned to her from her in-possession separated husband and aspirant young politician, later Prime Minister, Charles Gray, the Duchess's ardent admirer from her youth who remains her passion in adulthood plus other contemporary historical figures like Whig Prime Minister Fox and Restoration playwright Sheridan, always making appearances at some grand ball or somesuch. The point where Knightley's character realises she must make the same sacrifice for her children's welfare that she decried her friend earlier in the piece is the nexus of the film.
Knightley is very good as the young ingénue who learns the hard way, despite a native intelligence, just how little prepared she is for her deep-end entry into the man's world of Regency England. Fiennes' journey of self-exploration is shorter, but hints at the later concessions society would make to legitimate feminine demands in marriage as well as society as a whole.
Interior and exterior shots are beautifully set and lit. Many shots are well-composed including variations on the almost clichéd long-table shot of breakfasting husband and wife not communicating with each other. Ditto the costumes and particularly the extravagant hair-do's of the women of the day! I did however find the background music not always redolent of the era and so all-embracing that you often got the impression that a string quartet was playing just off-camera in almost every scene. Too much of a good thing.
A bitter-sweet tale then of female/motherly sacrifice which ends, rightly, on the side of the angels.