The Duchess

I didn't not like this film. Which surprised me. I've never failed to fail to not not like a film that had Keira Knightley in it before. Is that because she is like a living essay on the relationship between insecurity and that most Hollywoodesque of atributes – vanity? Is it because she simply never stops being Keira Knightley.... never becomes the character she is meant to portray with any degree of convincingness? Is it because I just find it so goddam annoying the way she keeps arching her neck, baring her teeth, pouting her lips and giving that “gentlemen prepare to board ship” look - that she completely fails to comprehend that it is not meant to be about what she looks like – a true actress forgets about what she looks like and just becomes the role. Anyway... having said all that …. the fact that KK was playing someone who was essentially an expensive clothes-horse and whose stiff artificiality of manner was in keeping with the times for once allowed the fact that she is clearly chosen for her roles on the basis of her visible charms and not on her ability to act - to go unnoticed to a great extent. And she certainly did do a lovely job of showing off the gorgeous Oscar winning costumes she was bedecked in – I enjoyed all that – the gorgeous wigs and elaborate frills – worth watching for that alone. And then there's the fact that it's based on a true story which reveals just how powerless and down-trodden women were in those days – yeetch – that was scary – and it made me want to truly thank the Miscellaneous Feminine Deity for those suffragette sisters of old who emancipated us from domestic slavery and a legal position little better than slaves. Still, I don't think the feministas should allow that to get them all into a man-hating froth about it all – after all men had it pretty hard in those days too being generally used as canon-fodder and dying in their droves in the horrible freezing mud and all that - of course it is good and necessary to have freed ourselves from an authoritarian and male orientated society – one that repressed the “feminine” world of feeling and imposed an intellectual-rational world-order and a system of imperialism and capitalist oppression. What has changed? Significantly, the fact that it is women now, rather than men, who are automatically given custodial rights over children. How this is frequently abused by denying visitation rights, and the fact that men go through just as much pain when they are separated from their kids as women do, is something which is perhaps swept under the carpet these days. Anyway, in those days it was the other way around – only there were no visitation rights – and a women frequently had to just do what she was told or face having her children taken from her and never seeing them again. Perhaps this film could have been better cast – with a real actress in the lead role – and perhaps someone less visibly sensitive than Ralph Fiennes as the authoritarian-male-ogre, but it's got a lot to recommend itself by even if it doesn't quite make excellent status.