Duchess, The (DVD)

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The story does make a few stabs at thematic material like feminism, women's rights, and the limitations of a male-dominated society, but it's halfhearted and lasts maybe two minutes total. The film also attempts to wow us with glorious location shots, stately manor houses, real-life palaces, beautiful countrysides, idyllic, pastoral settings, and busy cityscapes. Yet for all its attempts at verisimilitude, it never persuades us to believe that it's anything but a group of impersonal actors putting on a show.

At its heart, "The Duchess" is little more than another cinematic exhibition of the aristocracy behaving badly. While it's an attractive film to look at, there is no substance beneath the veneer. The characters have affairs. That's what they're best at. Then the last half hour takes on such a leisurely pace, it looks as though director Saul Dibbs shot it in slow motion. I'm sure there must be a compelling reason for a viewer to spend almost two hours with Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, but this film does not provide one.

Video:
I didn't get to see "The Duchess" in a theater (it didn't hang around long enough), but I did see a big-screen trailer for it several times, and this standard-def, anamorphic widescreen transfer appears to duplicate that experience fairly well. The thing is, although the director clearly wanted to create a sumptuous visual feast, he chose to use a largely pastel palette and to shoot largely on location, resulting in a soft, ultrasmooth, often hazy image. The 2.35:1 ratio screen size does sometimes contain some ravishing shots, but most of the time the picture seems to have a veil pulled over the proceedings, a golden glow often drenching a scene, with facial detailing polished over.

Audio:
Like the video quality, the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is almost nondescript. It produces a good, clear, if somewhat sharp-edged midrange and a reasonably wide front-channel stereo spread, but it has very little dynamic range, no serious bass to speak of, and a limited sense of surround. Very occasionally, we will hear a bird or a touch of musical ambience in the rear speakers. That's about it.

Extras:
The disc contains several bonus items. The first and longest is "How Far She Went...Making The Duchess," a twenty-two-minute behind-the-scenes featurette divided into six parts and going into the history of the main character and the history of the movie itself. After that are two other, shorter featurettes: "Georgiana in Her Own Words," seven minutes, based on the letters of Georgiana Spencer, and "Costume Diary," five minutes on the costume design.

The extras conclude with sixteen scene selections; previews at start-up and in the main menu; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages and subtitles; and a handsomely embossed slipcover.

Parting Shots:
"The Duchess" is a remarkably humdrum picture. Exposing the lives of superficial, pointless persons such as the ones in this movie must serve a purpose, perhaps as some kind of moral lesson about inappropriate human behavior; I dunno. Yet the movie seems almost as superficial as the characters in it, barely scratching the surface of these people, let alone retelling their real-life history in any compelling manner. The film is appealing to look at with its dreamy, misty tone, but this cannot compensate for its failing to move a viewer in any particular way or its having little to say in the process.

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