THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (C+) - Peter Strickland is a fussy little fetishist.
I love the IMDb one-line synopsis of this film: "A woman who studies butterflies and moths tests the limits of her relationship with her lover." Yep, that just about covers it.
Except it's not really clear who is driving the relationship between Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna); who's the submissive and who's the dominant one? Evelyn demands to be treated like a submissive, actually penning scripts for Cynthia to follow and expressing disappointment when Cynthia struggles to keep up the facade.
At times I wondered whether this was one big joke by Strickland. There are times when he's obviously going for dry, kitschy humor, and he succeeds. (He intersperses scenes of boring lectures by Cynthia and others, about bugs mostly, and among those in the all-female crowd is a mannequin.) But most folks will take this seriously. And if you approach it that way, here, too, Strickland is sometimes successful.
Stripped of its bygone-era setting and elaborate sets and costumes -- and its general homage to '70s European soft-core porn typified by "Emmanuelle" -- this is a love story, a familiar one in which the couple have been together so long that they struggle to find fresh ways to interact. Even the kinky ones get bored, apparently.
Like in his previous effort (below), repetition is some sort of theme here. For some reason, we see Cynthia drain a glass of water six times. To what end? Is she thirsting for something that Evelyn can't give her?
The film is painfully aware of its precious setting, but it's dragged down by its devotion to its euro-trash forebears. It all feels as suffocating as sleeping in a locked trunk each night.
BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012) (C-minus) - This '70s period piece drones on for a little over an hour and then loses its marbles in the final 20 minutes. The trick is making it to those final 20 minutes.
Purportedly a psychological thriller, it stars Toby Jones as a Brit who arrives for work at a sound studio in Italy, assisting with voice-over dubs and foley work. But something's not right. The eccentric director is mostly absent, and when he is around he's abusive, especially to the sexy women who are hired mainly to scream at various pitches to replicate the visual horrors being inflicted on the witches featured in the movie-within-a-movie, "The Equestrian Vortex."
Strickland is all about style over substance. He essentially forgets to craft an actual story; the narrative here would fit comfortably in a film short. Whether to pad things out or because he's enamored of his own technical and aesthetic flourishes, he repeats images and dialogue over and over. I lost count of the number of times the studio's red "Silenzio" sign (the equivalent of the do-not-enter "On Air" sign) flashes ominously. Strickland's camera lovingly luxuriates over the knobs and dials throughout the studio.
Those final 20 minutes provide a classic horror-film twist. Jones's perplexed shlub snaps out of his stupor, finally, and gets sucked into the insanity. As payoffs go, it's too little too late.
Who is this movie for? Men who have a fetish for screaming Italian women? Silenzio, already!
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