Don't spank me. Since the distributors of Peter Strickland's wholly magnificent soft- pornographic whirligig have cheekily decided to release their film opposite Fifty Shades of Grey, they presumably expect us to draw some sort of comparison. We will obey.
Both films concern themselves with a consensual relationship between dominant and submissive sexual partners. Both have much to do with ropes, scolding and ritual humiliation. Only one features conversation about “a human toilet”.
The release strategy demands we point out that the intelligent viewer should choose The Duke of Burgundy over Fifty Shades of Grey. We obey. Then again, Strickland's follow up to Berberian Sound Studio is so different in atmosphere and intent to that blockbuster that grouping the films in the same sentence seems slightly absurd. What have I said? Don't look at me that way? I'm filth.
The Duke of Burgundy begins with Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen, star of Borgen) humiliating her "maid" Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna) in oddly stilted language. She castigates her for her lateness. There is some argument about inadequately washed underwear. Eventually Evelyn is taken behind a frosted glass door that, though closed against the camera, does allow the ominous noise of trickling fluid to reach us.
It transpires that the couple is enacting a sexual ritual. Their dialogue to this point has been a series of incantations, delivered so often they have lost all juice. Strickland's film – shot in Hungary – takes place in a timeless middle-Europe that, some distance from these sleepy laneways, might also accommodate Zenda or The Grand Budapest Hotel. Yet these are impressively fleshed out human beings. Strickland's script gets at a paradox within such relationships. Cynthia is as much a slave to Evelyn as the pseudo-maid is a vassal to the cultured faux-aristocrat. The demands of enacting the dominant role are exhausting and, when Cynthia refuses to play along, the decision is more hurtful to her lover than any amount of recreational sexual cruelty.
One can only say so much about The Duke of Burgundy without (ahem) rubbing up against vintage European erotica. Like Berberian Sound Studio, the new film is breathless in its devotion to a particular school of 1970s Italian cinema. This time round, rather than horror, the director references the beautifully made, indisputably dubious soft-pornography of virtuosi such as Jess Franco. We begin with a retro title sequence, scored to a delightfully naïve soundtrack by Cat's Eyes, that follows Evelyn as she cycles through the same class of sun-dappled wood that so often caused the subjects of David Hamilton's photographs to disrobe. That dandelion-infused atmosphere persists throughout.
Strickland admits that he can't pretend to offer a female gaze, but the decision to set the film in a community of intellectually curious women – unlike, say, the cloisters of Franco's "nunsploitation" films – does go some way to detoxifying the sexual politics. No men are seen in The Duke of Burgundy. The women are particularly concerned with the behaviour of butterflies such as the titular Duke of Burgundy.
Strickland's researches in high-end trash may, from a distance, suggest Quentin Tarantino's continuing disinterment of exploitation cinema. His intention seems, however, closer to that of Todd Haynes in Far From Heaven: an attempt to use earlier vocabularies to investigate slightly less fantastic, slightly more nuanced lives. What happens to such a relationship when the dominant partner wants to relax in flannel pyjamas? What are the everyday practical difficulties of maintaining such a fantasy life?
For all these investigations, The Duke of Burgundy remains a work of high exotica. Nic Knowland's soothing cinematography summons nostalgia for an era most viewers won't clearly remember.
D’Anna and Knudsen maintain a fantastic hauteur. Both lingerie and perfume are mentioned in the credits. Some may find all this a little arousing. Such reactions are allowed.
