The Duke of Burgundy Peter Strickland (UK; 2014)
The Duke of Burgundy Peter Strickland (UK; 2014) Sidse Babett Knudson; Monica Swinn
Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 29 Jan 2026; Ticket: £7.00
Insecti=cide…the bugs have the excuse of being dead
My feeling after viewing Strickland’s ‘Duke of Burgundy’ was that I had viewed a sub-standard piece of formulaic erotica directed by a director seduced by his own amour propre. The film dominated by Strickland’s input as writer director, feels like a love note to himself, an exercise in a particular sort of contemporary narcissism.
The title is taken from the name of a type of highly patterned butterfly of which we see many in the course of the film, mostly dead, like the film itself.
The Duke of Burgundy is an indulgent movie lacking tensions and ideas that reveals Strickland as a film monger, who in this movie manipulates form and structure to engender the illusion that his films have some sort of substance.
In ‘Katalin Varga’ Strickland made extensive use of landscape to extend out the emotional mood of his revenge narrative; in ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ he made similar use of his sound track to feed and extend the layered narrative threads. In both these movies the form and structure of the material fed directly into the film’s themes and subject matter: revenge in the case of ‘Katalin’ and in ‘Berberian’ the idea of evil as a pervasive overflowing overwhelming psychic force.
Intercut visual imagery and sound fx as filmic devices can work as signifiers pointing to something in the nature of the film. The use of landscape or skyscape shots cut into the flow of a drama implies that the audience should make some sort of cognitive or emotional link (or perhaps make an absurdist non-link) implicit in the juxtaposition of the two different sources of imagery. Likewise the use of suggestive emotive or violent sound superimposed on images out of the visual context is a signifier or a manipulator that radically changes the viewers’ state of mind and understanding of what they are seeing on screen.
‘Katalin Varga’ justifies its cut-aways to scenic imagery by suggesting the linking of the idea of revenge with the forces of nature; ‘Berberian Sound Studio’s’ demonic sound fx work effectively for the first half of the scenario before collapsing in on themselves, overused and unable to sustain the weight of its soundscaped and infested netherworlds. In ‘The Duke of Burgundy’ there’s a lack of underlying idea. Strickland’s filmic devices register as tricks, spurious effects used to fill out his soft porn scenario, to leaven footage that is otherwise drearily monotonous. For all the SM baggage the seamed stockings, high heeled boots, bodices, encasement, bondage and SM persiflage eventally come across as rather silly but not particularly interesting.
‘The Duke of Burgindy’ locks into the mistress/servant game that Cynthia and Evelyn are playing (a game that sometimes breaks down). The relationship is characterised by long mannered invariant looks that pass between the two players and Strickland’s dialogue. I know that most of the dialogue takes place ‘within the game’ but delivered in dead-pan deliberation the actual lines are at the level of a subpar Monty Pythan spoof.
The Duke of Burgundy script, without a driving idea or perception, lacking in tensions has no where to go and ends up going nowhere. To the relationship between Evelyn and Cynthia Strickland adds the trees the bugs and bug talk asking the viewer to buy into spliced manipulation rather than significance. Strickland’s film traps the audience on the surface of life but it’s a flat dull surface.
If you really identify with flat surface, then this is the movie for you. So perhaps it’s an identity thing.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk