MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
(106 minutes)
August 1, 4 pm, Kino Cinema 2; Forum, 9pm, August 9
Critics of wider experience have compared Peter Strickland's chilly S&M chamber drama to the Euro-trash erotica of the '60s and '70s, which depicted giddy, costumed goddesses in sun-drenched chateaux.
The Duke of Burgundy, in which the exquisitely refined lady of the manor (Borgen star Sidse Babett Knudsen) welcomes an ostensible factotum (Chiara D'Anna) each day with an instruction to hand-wash her dirty smalls, may well owe a good deal to such films: I couldn't possibly say.
What I do know is that its exquisitely art-directed world and studiously artificial performances immediately evoke other references from that era of a much more elevated kind: Fassbinder's Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Bergman's Persona, even Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating.
The two women are lepidopterists, the Duke of Burgundy a moth they are studying together when they are not acting out the dominant's fantasies.
Certainly they enjoy an uncommon number of interests, but of such rarity and brittleness that their shared life is clearly marbled with hairline cracks, threatening to shatter at any moment.
You don't have to be a lesbian sub-dom fantasist to feel that terrible tension; Strickland brings it home as elegantly as he does everything.
