Peter Strickland’s first two films, Katalin Varga (2009) and Berberian Sound Studio (2013), were arresting works from a distinctive and enormously gifted talent. The first film, produced on a tiny budget in rural Transylvania, was a largely straight-forward revenge drama that built to a cruelly ironic climax and provided, on the way, an enriching portrait of its heroine’s propensity for role-playing, a method of acting in life in order to correct the damage done to her and essentially revise her own narrative. The follow-up charted the mental collapse of a movie sound technician where that collapse was presented via the texture of cinema itself. The Duke of Burgundy to a certain extent melds these two disparate predecessors as it readily references the peculiar charms of ‘70s European trash cinema again whilst delving into David Lynchian headspace mystification, whilst returning to his first film’s fascination for woman with protean surfaces and powerful internal motives. Strickland’s calling card aesthetic apes the tone of a bygone genre of filmmaking whilst unmooring it from traditional generic storytelling’s demands for clear, essential cause-and-effect. The subject has an aspect of self-satire: the two women at the heart of The Duke of Burgundy, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), are, like Strickland, fetishists enthralled and inspired by a certain variety of backdated fantasia. Strickland introduces their world to initially bemuse the audience as to what they’re watching, as Evelyn, dressed as a maid, rides across the countryside to a large mansion, where Cynthia, the haughty lady of the house, sets her to exacting and humiliating labours. The old porn cliché of the wicked aristocrat subjecting her hapless underling to a strict regimen is enacted. When the fatal moment comes when Evelyn fails to wash one of Cynthia’s smalls, she’s dragged into the bathroom for her punishment. Except that, as it soon emerges, Cynthia and Evelyn are a couple, and what we’ve seen is the elaborate, oft-repeated routine of S&M-accented role-playing that defines and fires their relationship.
Strickland’s grasp on the specifics of this relationship, an odd, equally beguiling and perturbing blend of sheltered cherishing and transgressive impulses that subtly test the limits of that bond, confirms his talents for creating characters with unusual traits and instincts, who can be empathised with but who are not cheaply “relatable,” and scenes in the film’s first half are as good as anything Strickland has done to date. His pitch-black sense of humour emerges throughout, particularly in a droll sequence when the couple speak to a “Carpenter” (Fatma Mohamed) who specialises in building bondage equipment: disappointed that the elaborate bed/cage the Carpenter is most famed for making can’t be built and delivered in time for Evelyn’s birthday, Evelyn pricks her ears up hopefully when the Carpenter suggests a human toilet rig instead. Later, when Cynthia confronts Evelyn after she’s caught polishing the boots of a neighbour, the tone is at once deeply farcical and uncomfortably grave, as the roles of the characters the two are playing – reprehending mistress and doe-eyed, pitiable slave – blend with their actual characters – offended lover and her wayward partner – to a degree that’s impossible to extricate. Rather than be merely drawn to the potentially comic inferences of the game the ladies sustain, Strickland comprehends that such games can be defined by a smothering self-seriousness. Evelyn’s single-minded need to get her rocks off via specific acts tramples other considerations, and her swooningly grateful protestations to Cynthia – “This is all I ever dreamed of!” – are also overweening demands that suggest both an overgrown child’s neediness and a junkie’s pleading rapacity.
The title refers to a species of butterfly as well as suggesting old-world associations of cultured power. The couple’s safe-word, “pinastri” (it’s a type of moth- yes, there’s a theme developing here) has an odd and foreign ring that makes it sound like an invocation, particularly when its emerges from the coffin-like cabinet Evelyn insists on being locked in – only to start begging for release in the dead of night. Cynthia, the older of the two, is tiring of being forced to meet Evelyn’s overpowering needs and mediating their life together through the prisms of enacted surfaces. Cynthia injures her back whilst hauling a crate for Evelyn to be locked up in into the bedroom. Evelyn deals awkwardly, even ignorantly with such realities, being far too obsessed with getting her rocks off in her own peculiar way. In one scene, at once beguilingly intimate and excruciatingly awkward, Strickland depicts the couple in bed after a night of connubial bliss. Awake in the morning, Cynthia wants to lounge in tactile communion, but Evelyn instead encourages her to spit threats whilst she diddles herself. Knudsen’s register of emotions, veering from warmth to offence and irritation to resigned facility, is particularly noteworthy here. The tensions between age and youth, the demands of eros versus the yearnings of domestic coupling, are expertly charted. Strickland’s revisionism here is deeper than it first appears as he takes on an old and gaudy brand of pornographic provocation defined by a fascination with lesbianism at once awed and detached from its reality: he sarcastically has his real couple attempting to fit themselves into false moulds because, well, yes, fantasies have power, and yet uses the artifice to expose the somewhat hapless humanity of Cynthia and Evelyn.
The hermetic nature of both the existence of these characters and the overall aesthetic of Strickland’s film is insistently underlined: static, mathematical designs in wallpaper contrast more oblique and organic patterns, the pinned inmates of butterfly collections where forms repeat with small variations in size and array. Such patterns inform Strickland’s visual scheme, built around recurring shots, so of which quickly become so familiar that he can use one specifically, like a glimpse of Evelyn’s coiffed and cooing appearance against the blue-tiled walls of the mansion’s toilet, as an orientating point to tell us at any given time what point the latest edition of the fantasy is up to. The film might, or might not, actually be set in period sometime in the 1960s or ‘70s, as the ladies parade in retro fashions of haute-couture spectacle and bang away on typewriters. Evelyn’s need to play the game through over and over, perhaps hoping for some ultimate perfection that will annihilate the gap between performers and performance, sees instead inevitable breakdowns in the patterning, stray and random elements disturbing the texture, frustrating her desire but also delivering from suffocation. The only neighbour seen is Lorna (Monica Swinn), a grey hausfrau constantly beating her carpets, whilst Cynthia and Evelyn occasionally go to the local institution to attend lectures in their common passion, which is, the study of moths and butterflies—a touch that echoes a wealth of erotic and surrealist art, from Luis Bunuel to A.S. Byatt to Walerian Borowczyk and Dario Argento. The lectures are also entirely delivered and listened to by groups of perfectly coiffed women, evoking Clare Booth’s The Women, or perhaps the conventions of yuri anime, which depicts worlds without males where lesbianism between slender young ladies is a casual convention.
In spite of Strickland’s nominal subject of unusual sexuality, he dances about the subject in a manner that might seem admirably un-exploitative to some or prissy to others. Very little sexual activity is actually seen: the repeated climax of Cynthia and Evelyn’s play-act always takes place behind a close door, although it’s made clear by audio that it involves water sports. The one overt glimpse of something that might be construed as mildly pornographic, of Evelyn eating out Cynthia ensconced in an armchair, is refracted via a mirror in a shot that recalls the piss-elegant carnality of Radley Metzger’s Therese and Isabelle (1967). Metzger is probable influence here alongside Jesus Franco, the epicurean sides of Lucio Fulci and Argento, as well as higher-class perviness like Something for Everyone (1970) and Mulholland Drive (2001). The essence of the structuring however points in a different direction, to the algorithmic behavioural studies of Hong Sang-soo (e.g. The Day He Arrives, 2012), visions of humankind’s half-cognisant fondness for and resentment of the patterns that enclose us. In the film’s second half the same slow dissolution of perceived reality that Strickland offered in Berberian Sound Studio begins to take grip, complete with languorously mesmeric zoom shots and droning, atonal scoring that suggest the constant presence of something dark and irrational clawing at the psyches of our heroines or haunting them in the dark corridors of their decaying home. Strickland zooms in on Knudsen’s black panty-clad crotch as he journeys deeper into a Jungian zone of proto-sexual flux, and Cynthia has visions of herself and Evelyn sinking into oblivion together in the midst of dark forests, like some lost snippet from Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1961) or perhaps even echoing back to Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ in contemplating the deep roots of metaphor behind the Gothic figurations of forbidden sexuality.
The trouble here is that where Strickland tethered his cinematic games to the disintegration and reintegration of his antihero’s psyche in Berberian Sound Studio, this time the same stunts feel somewhat aimless, an affectation that spares Strickland from having to develop his story. There is no reason Strickland’s fascination for the oneiric, and his undoubted ability to transmute it into cinematic texture, should be beholden to any expectation of sense beyond sensory appeal: lord knows I was certainly happy to defend this from the people who regarded Berberian Sound Studio as some kind of cheat for not eventually delivering genre thrills. Strickland’s work here can be defended as he studies a situation that is definably kinky but still essentially commonplace as opposed to more genuinely transgressive asocial behaviour: certainly the ironic gap between life’s mundanity and the yearning for the transformative power of grand fantasy is part of his theme as well as an ingrained aspect of his creative disposition. And yet his method accidentally retards his hopes for such irony to gain power, because he’s exiled everyday life from the picture. His moves beyond the confines of the Cynthia-Evelyn tryst are instead stylised to seem like only another aspect of it, making his joke arch rather than sly. Strickland isn’t yet as good at capturing the radical, ephemeral fluctuations of the dreamtime veldt as Lynch, or as bold as the horror filmmakers he references in creating dreamlike textures out of concrete stories: the journey here doesn’t seem to have much to say about the mindscapes of his heroines, and the imagery lacks value beyond superficial prettiness.
Strickland lets his film dissolve into visual white noise at one point, as Cynthia envisions Evelyn smothered in a swarm of moths. This moment has a similar quality to that wonderful adjunct in Berberian Sound Studio where the on-screen movie suddenly fractured and gave way to the protagonist’s rural documentary – but it’s not as clever or jarring a swerve. There’s something oddly fussy about Strickland’s filmmaking this time around as well as repetitious, an over-determined quality to his digressive phantasmagoria that means that it never quite catches afire and burns with pure inner life. Strickland has wound himself into his characters: they cannot operate without a myth, a way and mode of seeing and feeling to filter their desires and react against, and at this point in his creative evolution Strickland can’t either. Having watched Franco’s Eugenia (1974) not long before this, the contrast was striking, as Franco’s cruder yet equally hypnotic film took a similar folie-a-deux to far more interesting and visceral places. Strickland, by comparison, comes across as a prim bourgeois hiding behind a façade of art. I doubt he really is that, and yet the type of misbehaving anti-art Strickland clearly adores had courage on levels he’s not yet ready or willing to seize. I hope for his next film Strickland ventures back out into the forest and the primal facts as he did with Katalin Varga. The Duke of Burgundy is a fascinating piece of moviemaking, but also a quiet misfire from a potentially major filmmaker.
