The Lady and the Duke
Seeing a film by the great Eric Rohmer was once notoriously likened to  "watching paint dry"; in the hauntingThe Lady and the Duke, it's as if  paint has come to life. To re-create France in the 1790s, Rohmer staged his  intimate scenes against blue screens where his digital footage would be blended  with backgrounds from Romantic paintings and eerily pure perspective drawings of  18th-century streets, rooflines, and landscapes. This cost-effective technique  pays rich dividends, creating aMasterpiece Theatre-type world of such  quaintness, it seems impervious to the bloody Reign of Terror crowding in ever  more insistently from just offscreen. That's a rough analogue for the  precariously privileged existence of our sympathetic main characters: Grace  Elliott (Lucy Russell), a Scotswoman relocated to France, and Philippe, duc  d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), her close friend and former lover, who's also  King Louis XVI's cousin. As in so many Rohmer works, much of the film consists  of conversations marking milestones in this pair's now-platonic, yet still  intellectually passionate, relationship. But this time the issues truly are  life-and-death.--Richard T. Jameson