As I entered the darkened cinema, a character onscreen said with remarkable clarity of diction, "You're late." I laughed to myself. Could this be my Brian Wilson moment? Would words from a movie throw me into a devastating bout of paranoia? Perhaps secretly one always hopes a film will refract one's personal experience, and so constitute an iteration of one's own particular psychic dilemma. Perhaps not. Anyway, nothing so surreal, psychedelic, or dreadful ensued during the 100 or so minutes the putative lesbian sex fantasia The Duke of Burgundy took to unspool. You can see it, or not, starting Friday, Jan. 23, at Landmark's Opera Plaza Cinemas.
"You're late" turned out to be the first sentence in a series of scripted sentences in a sadomasochistic ritual enacted by two characters occupying rooms in some sort of villa in some sort of European country, which was probably Hungary, since that's where director Peter Strickland is said to have shot his film. Trying to figure out where the hell they were was a puzzle that occupied my mind as the characters inevitably repeated their erotic ritual several times, with some but maybe not enough variation. The idea being: all rituals wear thin. As the dom says to the sub, "Not a surprise if you're expecting it." The possibly unintended consequence of which narrative arc being, in a bad-dream Brian Wilsonesque parallel universe kind of way, to induce ennui. To set the viewer's mind a-wandering.
I didn't count how many times zaftig 40something Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen's face was filmed enunciating in a fairly flawless English accent, "You're late." Enough times to make me aware that this script within a script was almost a documentary of an erotic game staged as a feature film, in which the sadist-in-charge rigidly dictates all gesture, posture, inflection, and affect, again and again. Imagine the actresses scheming to break free of the redundant film's constraints. That's the film I want to see, and in a way, that's the film this film almost is. A bit more true to life, a bit less trope-happy, and Strickland could be an arresting metaphysical film director.
Knudsen plays the putative dominatrix, or mean bitch empress of an unlived-in villa stuffed with fantastic Victorian furniture, worn Persian rugs, and dead winged-insects neatly framed behind glass. Her at-home make-up is basic tart, her costumes running from standard-issue naughty lingerie to garish, well-fed, Slavic, ex-Soviet bourgeois chic. Out of harness, she wears baggy men's pajamas. And when she lectures a roomful of women devoted to the taxonomy and habits of moths, her makeup is suddenly, disconcertingly understated.
A word on fritillaries. The titular Duke of Burgundy, or Hamearis lucina, first defined by Linneaus in 1758, once classed a fritillary, is today considered an endangered species of butterfly. Primarily a woodland denizen, the Duke of Burgundy fed on primroses in dappled sunlight, leading a life that can only be described as a bohemian idyll. The cessation of coppicing in woodlands has tragically decimated colonies. This information isn't in the film, for which winged insects serve as something for women to bother their pretty little heads about, that's sufficiently weird to serve as twisted symbols of something-or-other. The ritual of the lecture being interspliced with the ritual of the handwashed panties is an attempt, one presumes, at simulating, if not stimulating some semblance of Sapphic sexual significance.
A word about panty-washing. Who does this? Wide-eyed, scrawny, pert-breasted somewhat-younger actress Chiara d'Anna, whose English is pathetically Italian-inflected. This impossible-to-please submissive schoolgirl stereotype stage-manages the household games, handwriting dialogue for the lady of the house like the accusatory, "You're late." We don't actually see her wash the panties, but we do see drops of water fall from the just-washed panties, in close-up, hung over a clothesline. We get to see the water-drop scene more than once, at suitable intervals. More than we really need to. More than the image warrants. Unless repetition is a strategy, which, in the absence of a full-length story to tell, it reveals itself to be.
If you've been longing for shots of characters reflected in mirrors, or glimpsed through windows, or seen as though with double vision, this is the film for you. Also, if you yearn for hexagonal refractions of light. Or if you like a soundtrack that replaces emotional throughlines, dramatic incident, or real-world sensuality with breathy soprano choruses accompanied by harpsichord, alternating with guitar strumming and ponderous woodwind solos. Call it an homage to, or desecration of vintage Delphine Seyrig and Stephane Audran vehicles. Call it kitsch, harmless fun, privileged male gaze. Call it peek-a-boo lesbian kink for clueless straight people. Call it independent film mimicking smut masquerading as art-house cinema. Call it girl-on-girl action that never takes on a life of its own.