Films: The Duchess & Marie-Antoinette
Jan. 2nd, 2009 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseHaving felt masochistic lately I’ve been searching out historically based films to subject myself to and having plunged through the nonsense that was Elizabeth followed by Elizabeth: the Golden Age, while not entirely feeling the need to rewatch the absolute torture that was Alexander, I settled on two more recent attempts at Hollywood history.
I’d seen far too much of the advertising regarding The Duchess to the point where I knew all about the furore over Keira Knightley being ‘enhanced’ in the promotional posters long before the film was even released. Sadly the advertising seemed about the most interesting part of it, with trailers consisting of lots of cross-cuts between film footage and the last royal death just over ten years ago. The fact that the Duchess in question was a Spencer as well seemed to be about the only solid parallel anyway. That said, the film wasn’t atrocious but then neither was it terribly good either. It sat somewhere in that moderately inoffensive region, sans one rape scene and an early attempt at conveying the main character’s youth with a very odd shot of her stocking-clad legs on her marriage night. The stocking shot at least was inoffensive too really as I can understand that while they were part of the normal attire of the age, these days they have schoolgirl connotations which I presume was intended to be implied by the visual; I was just annoyed by it. Really though, what didn’t particularly help when it came to sympathising with the characters or at least with the title character was the fact that her antagonist, the Duke of Devonshire, had all the funniest lines. I was genuinely amused by plenty of his dialogue and with a general sense of disinterest with the rest of film that didn’t inspire any sort of particular reaction in either direction.
Marie-Antoinette on the other hand was actually quite watchable, possibly because I don’t know as much about French history which prevented my wanting to scream at the screen at the liberties taken with it. This is another film that didn’t quite have much of a point to it and lacked quite a lot of definition because most of the surrounding events that led up the French Revolution were ignored in favour of the amusing awkwardness of having to learn protocol via osmosis. Though funnily enough I will say that I enjoyed it, modern music choices aside. And considering that the use of evidently modern music in period films usually is enough to make me get up and walk away from the entire farce it certain says something that I watched the entire thing through and wouldn’t call it a terrible film at all. It was at the end of the day something along the lines of ‘history lite’ in the same way that Quorn sausage still isn’t pork. Yet still, it wasn’t a bad way to pass a long afternoon at all.
I’d seen far too much of the advertising regarding The Duchess to the point where I knew all about the furore over Keira Knightley being ‘enhanced’ in the promotional posters long before the film was even released. Sadly the advertising seemed about the most interesting part of it, with trailers consisting of lots of cross-cuts between film footage and the last royal death just over ten years ago. The fact that the Duchess in question was a Spencer as well seemed to be about the only solid parallel anyway. That said, the film wasn’t atrocious but then neither was it terribly good either. It sat somewhere in that moderately inoffensive region, sans one rape scene and an early attempt at conveying the main character’s youth with a very odd shot of her stocking-clad legs on her marriage night. The stocking shot at least was inoffensive too really as I can understand that while they were part of the normal attire of the age, these days they have schoolgirl connotations which I presume was intended to be implied by the visual; I was just annoyed by it. Really though, what didn’t particularly help when it came to sympathising with the characters or at least with the title character was the fact that her antagonist, the Duke of Devonshire, had all the funniest lines. I was genuinely amused by plenty of his dialogue and with a general sense of disinterest with the rest of film that didn’t inspire any sort of particular reaction in either direction.
Marie-Antoinette on the other hand was actually quite watchable, possibly because I don’t know as much about French history which prevented my wanting to scream at the screen at the liberties taken with it. This is another film that didn’t quite have much of a point to it and lacked quite a lot of definition because most of the surrounding events that led up the French Revolution were ignored in favour of the amusing awkwardness of having to learn protocol via osmosis. Though funnily enough I will say that I enjoyed it, modern music choices aside. And considering that the use of evidently modern music in period films usually is enough to make me get up and walk away from the entire farce it certain says something that I watched the entire thing through and wouldn’t call it a terrible film at all. It was at the end of the day something along the lines of ‘history lite’ in the same way that Quorn sausage still isn’t pork. Yet still, it wasn’t a bad way to pass a long afternoon at all.
