Film of the week: The Duchess

THE DUCHESS (12A)
**

DIRECTED BY: SAUL DIBB
STARRING: KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, RALPH FIENNES, DOMINIC COOPER, HAYLEY ATWELL

A PEOPLE'S princess, a fashion icon, a good mother, a carer and a sharer, someone ruthlessly groomed for a life of privilege but still able to be engaged with the world and loved by everyone in it… except, that is, the man who married her. No, not as it happens Diana, Princess of Wales, but Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, a distant relation of Diana's.

Georgiana is the royal subject of this lavish 18th-century-set period piece, starring Keira Knightley as the romantically doomed heroine who had to suffer the indignity of her husband taking a lover right under her nose. It's not hard to see the modern parallels, primarily because the film's tacky marketing campaign is currently doing its best to play them up. "Two women… related by ancestry… united by destiny," chimes the trailer as shots of Knightley in period get-up are juxtaposed with pictures of Diana. "There were three of them in her marriage," screams the posters adorning bus stops and cinemas.

But while Knightley may have been forced to go on damage limitation recently, pleading ignorance about the Diana links when she was making the film, it would be disingenuous of the producers and director Saul Dibb to do the same. In scene after scene we see Knightley's Georgiana looking demure as courtiers comment on her extraordinary fashion sense, her people skills and her generosity. There are countless shots of sketch artists capturing her image like proto-paparazzi as she glides through high society. There's much chat too from pushy family members (in this case Georgiana's mother, played with steely coldness by Charlotte Rampling) about sacrificing personal happiness for status. As one of the men in the Duchess's life, Knightley's co-star Dominic Cooper even looks a little like Will Carling (and in this instance, is about as charismatic).

As attention-grabbing as this hook is, it does rather detract from the film, overwhelming what could have been a fascinating and bitter exploration of the vicissitudes of marriage and the limits of personal freedom among the upper classes at a time when British society was terrified by the prospect of political revolution.

That remains very much on the backburner, though, the film making only passing reference to the brewing French and American Revolutions and going for the more commercially viable option of moulding Georgiana's story into a shallower Diana-esque tale.

This is despite the fact that the major details of their incident-packed lives share only a tenuous connection. Kicking off with Georgiana as a well-bred 16-year-old plucked from her mother's house to wed the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) – despite having met him only twice before – the film spends the next couple of hours detailing the slow decline of their marriage as her inability to produce a male heir results in her unsympathetic husband seducing her best friend Bess (Hayley Atwell) and moving her into their mansion.

Headstrong, but humiliated, she reasons that two can play at this game and proceeds to seek solace in the arms of the rising Whig politician and future Prime Minister, Charles Grey (Cooper). Former childhood acquaintances, they embark on an all-consuming affair, the kind where discretion is an after-thought and wounded pride results in vindictive consequences.

Though this makes The Duchess sound like a trashy bodice-ripper along the lines of The Other Boleyn Girl, stylistically the film is closer in tone to Joe Wright's excellent Pride and Prejudice. Unfortunately director Saul Dibb, who made the intelligent London gang thriller Bullet Boy, doesn't put enough of his own stamp on the material or give it any real depth. Sure, there are flashes of inspiration, particularly in the way Dibb gradually increases the physical distance between Knightley and Fiennes on screen, but not enough to prevent the film from frequently descending to the level of frock porn.

Knightley, decked out in an array of astonishing outfits and wigs, spends an awful lot of time gliding around ornate candle-lit halls, riding in carriages, perching on ottomans and pouting at nothing in particular. She looks as lovely as usual, of course, and she works hard to give a sense of Georgiana's interior life by teasing out the tragedy of a smart and intelligent woman forced to curb her opinions and desires by a patriarchal society that gives rich men power over all aspects of a woman's life, including access to her children.

It's too bad, then, that the script doesn't go deep enough, ensuring that the dramatic success of her character's plight depends wholly on our ability to buy into the idea that Grey was the love of her Georgiana's life. That's a problem because Knightley and Cooper generate zero chemistry, so the relationship never resonates and the choices she makes are robbed of their tragic dimension. Indeed there's more zing between Georgiana and Bess (especially in a scene in which the latter pretends to be Grey), which really doesn't say much about Cooper's leading man potential. In the end, only Fiennes manages to transcend the material, letting a sly, malevolent wit bleed through the Duke's layers of reserve. He's a reprehensible bastard: cruel, distant, and occasionally violent, but he's also the only character who seems genuinely alive.