

Title: The Duke of Burgundy

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Director: Peter Strickland

Starring: Sidise Babett Knudsen, Monica Swinn, Chiara D’Anna

Runtime: 1 hr 44 mins

What It Is: Every single day Evelyn (D’Anna) and Cynthia (Knudsen) commit time to role playing elaborate dominant and submissive roles, and every night they end theirday with time together. Evelyn seems to enjoy the roleplay and it progressively getting more obsessed with the connection between sexuality and pain. Cynthia begins to resent the roleplays as Evelyn falls further, and starts to wonder whether Evelyn even loves her, or just needs her to fulfill her fantasies. They’ve reached the impasse of this situation. One of them will have to bend, something has to give. It’ll be their relationship or their prespective on sex.

What We Think: This deals with its eroticism in a way that humanizes the characters and their struggle it plays almost as a story of addiction. Evelyn is addicted to the thrill of the act and Cynthia is addicted to Evelyn. Never does the love between them reach the erotic heights of something like Blue is the Warmest Color, but it doesn’t need to. That isn’t the story this film is telling. Instead we have a woman in love with another woman that may or may not love her back.What Strickland does with simple imagery particularly that of a bug is pretty great.

Our Grade: B+, This was a really hard film for me to find, but I wanted to see what everyone was talking about. What I got was something unlike what I anticipated when I began watching the film. It’s a solid film, one that suffers from snail pacing, and the odd arthouse flair along the way. That slight arthouse flair my lose a casual viewer but if you invest yourself in the charaters and their story it’s a worthwhile endeavor.