Word: duchess
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...Duchess” is a period film about a beautiful, young, aristocratic female trapped in an unhappy situation. This time, it’s a marriage with three people: Georgiana, her husband, and her husband’s live-in mistress. The Duchess Georgiana, played by Keira Knightley, consoles herself by taking a dashing young lover, flaunting the newest fashions, and schmaltzing her way to the top of London society. The real-life Georgiana Cavendish was a relative of Princess Diana, a fact the filmmakers make sure to exploit. However, linking the story to Diana of Wales will not make...
Fortunately for us, however, it does not linger often or long at that level. As movies like this go - stately homes constantly arustle with the sound of lingerie falling gently to the parquet floors - it is quite a lively, and even occasionally a rather touching, piece. The Duchess takes in a young woman named Bess (Hayley Atwell) who is being abused by her brutish husband. In due course, she becomes the Duke's mistress, living more or less comfortably with the Duke and Georgiana. (It is a very big house.) Georgiana also takes a lover: a rising politician, Charles Grey...
...brain cells were not yet completely replaced by air. She conveys a nice sense of an untutored woman trying to embrace the world beyond the bounds of her class, while not being harassed by it - or by the tabloids, which existed in primitive form in those days, too. The Duchess, however, does not insist on such analogies; they're there for you if you want to find them. Mostly it trusts the intricacies of its story to hold your interest. And it does, with casual ease and unself-conscious style and wit. It has been some time since a period...
...Duchess Directed by Saul Dibb; rated...
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Keira Knightley), was an 18th century scandal magnet for having both a swine and a swain--an icy, cheating husband (Ralph Fiennes) and a Whig politician lover (Dominic Cooper). This middling drama is less a history lesson than a tour of sumptuous real estate. The loveliest acreage is Knightley's alabaster back...