New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
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London,
Charlotte O'Sullivan's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Saul Dibb.
Cast: Keira Knightley, Dominic Cooper, Ralph Fiennes, Hayley Atwell, Charlotte Rampling, Simon McBurney
Description: Eighteenth century social butterfly Georgiana Spencer is encouraged by her mother to marry the brutish Duke of Devonshire. The nobleman urgently needs a male heir and Georgiana must carry out her duties as a woman to ensure the continuation of the Duke's proud bloodline. When his wife fails to deliver on her end of the bargain, the Duke takes a mistress, Bess, driving poor Georgiana ever closer to her one true love, Charles Grey, the ambitious protege of Whig Party leader Charles Fox.
Country: US. 2008. 110mins
A matter of breeding: Georgiana (Keira Knightley) is married off to the much older Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes)
Agreement: She is expected to provide him with a male heir
Diana biopic? Comparisons have been drawn between Georgina and Diana's life
When is a Diana biopic not a Diana biopic? When it’s a film called The Duchess, a plush period drama that comes coyly advertised as something else. Princess Diana does not appear in the film, or even get mentioned, but the trailer invokes her like a talisman, juxtaposing Nineties news footage with portraits of The Duchess’s actual subject, an 18th-century aristocrat, while the voiceover explains that “the two were related by ancestry and united by destiny ...” For good measure, the poster bears the words: “There were three people in her marriage.”
The trailer does not lie, exactly. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was indeed originally a Spencer. Like her descendant, she was married off to an older man she grew to loathe and sought refuge in parties, children, humanitarian politics, media attention, public adulation and affairs.
Like Diana, she was denied a happy ending. But so what? The marketing men obviously felt the Di-factor would add a snappy relevance to the film’s fusty period setting. They should have had more confidence in their product.
The Duchess — an ambitious, if flawed, portrait of a lady — is perfectly able to stand on its own merits.
Jaunty teen Georgiana (Keira Knightley) enjoys flirting with her friend, Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper). But her mother (Charlotte Rampling) has a grander match in mind. The Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) is in need of a male heir. He agrees to marry “G” but becomes increasingly testy when, somewhat carelessly, she produces two daughters. He has a cheque waiting in the drawer for when she produces a boy; their marriage is a “necessary kind of barter” and he feels owed.
He cheers up only when she invites her pretty friend Lady Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell) to stay in their home. He likes Bess. And Bess, because she needs his help (her estranged husband won’t let her see their three sons but the duke has the power to make him), likes him back. Soon her whole family has moved in.
G becomes increasingly involved with the Whig party (the Left-wingers of their day) and, by chance, her old friend Charles Grey, an up-and-coming politician. The press and the people love her impulsive ways. The duke remains unimpressed. He keeps his wife on a long lead, but he’s the one in charge.
This is wonderfully toxic stuff and Knightley, for the most part, puts us right inside the drama. She pouts too much (she suffers from the facial equivalent of Tourette’s). When she’s good, though, she’s very good.
In a stand-out scene, G arrives at a party sozzled, lonely but — as ever — resplendently dressed. As she staggers around, her huge wig catches a candle and copious amounts of water are required to douse the offending bonfire. She is left crouching on the ground, her tiny skull and greasy mob cap exposed for all to see.
The visuals are strange and woozy — director Saul Dibb is obviously a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s off-kilter period epic Barry Lyndon. Yet it’s Knightley’s pinched face that makes you reel. You can practically smell Georgiana’s vulnerability. The girl reeks.
Ralph Fiennes is even better as the duke. He manages to make us believe in a man best described as dynamically depressed. The duke screws the servants, rapes his wife, plays with guns, snaps at everyone (including Bess). Yet, throughout, you sense that what he would most like to do is curl up in a basket with his dogs and go to sleep.
His exhausted blue eyes are every bit as arresting as Knightley’s famous mouth. It would have been easy to make Devonshire a Byronic villain. Somehow, thanks to Fiennes, he induces shivers without ever seeming larger than life.
So far, so infinitely better than Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, another film about a poor little It girl that signally failed to create any tension at all.
True, The Duchess does lose its way in the middle. The problem is that neither Charles Grey nor Bess have the necessary heft to complement the central, warring couple. It’s possible to blame Cooper for this shortfall: he’s got a horribly insipid presence. It’s possible to blame Atwell’s wigs: she looks like The Simpsons’ Disco Stu. But it’s the script — an adaptation of Amanda Foreman’s biography by Jeffrey Hatcher — that’s at fault.
Grey, a presumably intelligent man, talks in anachronistic clichés. Bess, meanwhile, is less of a character than a convenient catalyst. Bursting with mother-love, she is also the ultimate Girl’s Best Friend, full of sexual tips (a saucy scene between the two women has been invented), sympathy and naughty ruses. It’s she who brings Georgiana and Grey together, simply because she wants G to be happy. This puts both women in a good light — God forbid that our heroine should seek out sex!
The Duchess doesn’t want to make anyone look bad. As a result, the film briefly lurches into farce. Luckily, the ending gets us back on track. Some will be unmoved by the final scenes of Georgiana and her newborn, illegitimate daughter. Not me. I howled.
Dibb’s last film was called Bullet Boy and told the harrowing story of a doomed Hackney teenager trying to escape a life of crime. He has tried to make Georgiana’s quest for independence — her attempt to gain power via the media and the Whigs — just as gritty. Against the odds, he mostly succeeds.
Derek Malcolm is away
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