Peter Strickland’s third feature, The Duke of Burgundy (2014) is a film about Masochism. Here, we mean Masochism in le sens fort—as the French say—, which is to say not the cheaply scandalized sexual perversion misunderstood simply as “submission” or even that which is commonly taken as nothing more than the complement of sadism. No, to both his and the film’s great merit, Strickland is careful not to mince terms. Instead, the Masochism we encounter as we delve into the tender and perverse world of Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna)—a dom/sub couple whose meticulously controlled and repetitious relationship begins to tread the fine line between boredom and bliss—is that of the refined and distinct pornological[1] structure introduced (or rather, diagnosed) by the Austrian romantic, utopian, and humanist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Thus, in welcome contrast to the bargain-bin provocations of 50 Shades of Grey (2015) and the demonized bourgeois violence of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), The Duke of Burgundy presents a sensitive and studied look at Masochism as it emerges from the literature for which the perversion was named.
-Kings Review
