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June
4, 2002, 8:45 a.m. By Victor Morton |
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last, a French film for conservatives to love.
There is not one anti-American slur, not one mention of Jerry Lewis, not one bit of pretense to martial glory or cultural superiority, not one outburst of anti-Semitism followed by righteous denunciation of Le Pen — not even one chance rendezvous in a used-book store with an ingénue student. And the film even pretty much allows that the French Revolution might have been a really bad thing.
This bizarre French entrée is The Lady and the Duke, the latest film from Eric Rohmer, eightysomething dean of the French New Wave. Yet the film is not merely a political tract — a French film for those who loathe France.
The Lady and the Duke is also a technical marvel — the best digital video movie I've ever seen. But the virtuosity isn't simply grafted onto a script with essentially conservative themes; it actually embodies and makes those themes possible. Rohmer's use of recent improvements in DV allows him to make a historical film that takes the past seriously, as something with its own integrity (a worthy conservative goal in itself). It meets the two apparently contradictory demands of the historical genre — both giving the audience a sense of the strangeness of times past and reminding it that the past was as real as we are.
Almost a quarter-century ago, Rohmer tried to achieve these estranging-identifying effects in the 1978 film Perceval, a medieval Chrétien de Troyes tale of chivalry. In Brechtian fashion, characters narrated their actions in the third person; songs and even sound effects were performed by an on-screen chorus; and the cardboard-like stage sets could not have been more obviously fake. Perceval was interesting, but ultimately a failure — I could never chase away that last ounce of suspicion that I was watching something campy or cheesy; King Arthur as done by a bunch of pals on public-access cable.
The Lady and the Duke is Rohmer's first attempt at a period piece since Perceval. Set during the French Revolution, it centers on the relationship between Grace Elliott, a staunch British-emigré royalist, and her former lover the Duke of Orléans, a French republican aristocrat nicknamed "Philippe Egalité."
What makes The Lady and the Duke a much more successful, and even great, film is that advances in digital technology have allowed Rohmer to achieve here precisely what he was grasping for in Perceval — to make a film that blends the realistic and the strange without either condescending to the past or turning it into a pale imitation of the present.
The "strange" in The Lady and the Duke concerns not just the mores of the time (as would always be the case) but also specifically its politics. Much of the drawing-room conversation between the titular characters concerns topics that, while certainly present residually, are not exactly live issues as themselves at the start of the 21st century — monarchical vs. republican rule, primarily.
The film's mixture of paintings and DV allows it to achieve the apparently contradictory goals of both strangeness and realism. The exterior scenes were shot in a studio, with the actors performing in front of the kind of blue screens weather anchors use for maps. Later those screens are replaced digitally with paintings of Paris as it looked in the 1790s. That we are not seeing an ordinary film is obvious; but the fakery, though present, is not as glaring as in Perceval. For example, there are figures in the background moving and changing perspective; the resulting movie looks realistic, but also a little odd.
The combination is perfect: DV's immediacy brings home that the past was as real as we are; and the painted exteriors get around DV's worst limitation — its limited depth and tendency to blurriness in the medium and longer ranges. Moreover, the necessarily imperfect blending of paintings and live action manages to emphasize the strangeness of the past — without estranging us totally.
The Lady and the Duke is a French film — made by a Frenchman, and using the top resources of the French film industry — that is highly and openly critical of the French Revolution — the founding myth of modern France. If there's another film that fits that description, I can't think of it.
The figure in the film with whom we identify is the royalist Grace Elliott — not the republican Duke of Orleans, or some "progressive" apparently sent from the present (as we'd expect in something by Merchant-Ivory, let's say).
In the most suspenseful set piece in The Lady and the Duke, Elliott attempts to return home after curfew and comes across a man in need of a place to hide. We are shown the Parisian mob, carrying heads around on blood-soaked poles as though they were totemic trophies. Revolutionary committees demand the private letters of "Citizen Elliott" — like a liberal's nightmare of an Ashcroftian theocracy, except that this was real. Rohmer manages to make revolutionary Paris as threatening as anything in Hitchcock or Kafka.
Even as someone who considers the French Revolution a contender for the title of worst event in human history, I could hardly believe what I was seeing — so inured had I become to getting the Popular Front version of history. And yet there's a moment of grace shown toward the revolutionaries near the end (to say more would spoil it) that seems uncharacteristic — though not, when you think about it, for the Catholic Rohmer.
Rohmer based his film on Elliott's memoirs, but insists he had no political axe to grind in doing so. He told Aurélien Ferenzi in the September-October issue of Senses of Cinema, an online film journal, that "I didn't make this film for any political reasons. I don't use it to defend any party, royalist or anti-royalist." He sounded a similar theme in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma.
Trust the tale, not the teller. In The Lady and the Duke, the character we most identify with hits on all the anti-Revolutionary themes of Edmund Burke, Joseph De Maistre, and others, and still cited to this day by American and British conservatives: that revolutionaries can never be appeased, satisfied, or controlled; that they're at bottom just a base, power-hungry mob out for blood, and that cares nothing for morals or even for who's on their side.
The duke's fate mirrors that of many East Europeans who tried to enter coalitions in hopes of taming the Soviet-controlled Communists in the 1940s. Elliott mocks the efficient execution machine that is the guillotine as the kind of progress revolutions produce; and, remember, the East German secret police was the world's most efficient.
Plus ça change...
— Victor Morton is a writer in Washington, D.C.