The Duke of Burgundy explores the softer side of sleaze
Before Fifty Shades of Grey ties critics in knots, The Duke of Burgundy offers a fresh look at the decadent past and uncertain future of big-screen erotica
The Duke of Burgundy is a film that invites viewers to revel in its sensual extravagance and outré carnality. Those qualities are emphasized by two unusual items in the film's opening credits: citations for the production’s special purveyors of perfume and lingerie. Suffice to say you will find no such entries in the IMDb listing for Grown Ups 2.
It’s a sly touch that highlights the peculiarly tactile nature of director Peter Stickland’s surreal erotic drama, even if the British filmmaker was being disingenuous with those credits. In a recent phone interview from the U.K., he admits he didn’t order production assistants to continually spritz the set, a decision he regrets what with “all those hot lights and everyone sweating away.”
The ruse also fits with the fact that The Duke of Burgundy is more suggestive than explicit when it comes to its portrayal of the relationship between a butterfly expert and her housekeeper, a dynamic that initially evokes clichés about sadomasochism yet ultimately becomes something very different, even poignant. Even more provocative are the questions the movie elicits about erotica and cinema, a hot topic now that the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey may signal a shift in Hollywood’s curiously prudish attitude about sex on the big screen.
Given the evermore risqué imagery that can be found throughout the media — never mind the clothes-optional nature of must-see TV such as Game of Thrones, Masters of Sex and The Affair — it can seem counterintuitive to hear that sex sometimes /doesn’t/ sell. But when it comes to movies, that may very well be the case. According to a 2009 study by the Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University, which examined the response to more than 900 films released between 2000 and 2005, critics and audiences both expressed an aversion to graphic sex in mainstream movies. However blasé viewers have become about sex everywhere else in culture, they didn’t want to deal with it at the multiplex.
Hollywood had suspected as much. Although things were plenty steamy when erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct did big business in the ’ 80s and ’ 90s, such content became scarcer after the poor box-office performance of many big releases — including Eyes Wide Shut — that were hyped on the basis of their raciness.
Linda Ruth Williams, a film scholar whose 2005 study “The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema” charts the rise and fall of Hollywood’s last major flirtation with adult content, cites the institution of the NC-17 rating as a major contribution to this new conservatism. “It had seemed to be the great hope for those wanting to make adult, non-pornographic films for grown-up audiences,” she says. “Instead, it proved to be a noncommercial ghetto.”
This shift in mores was inevitable as the Internet made adult entertainment available in venues far more private than the grindhouses of the ’ 70s and ’ 80s. In any case, it’s been a long time since there was a mass-marketed movie as explicit as Fifty Shades of Grey, whose sex scenes comprise 20 minutes of its 100-minute running time. (It somehow escaped a NC-17 rating in the U.S.)
Of course, makers of independent films responded to competition from the XXX world differently than Hollywood. Essentially using sex as a special effect, many continued to keep pace with ever more brazen depictions of salacious acts while still trying to retain those things that viewers expect from movies of a more rarefied quality, like characters who aren’t pizza delivery men. Blue Is the Warmest Color and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac are two recent examples, though as Strickland notes, The Duke of Burgundy was conceived more as an homage to an earlier and largely “disreputable” tradition of erotic dramas. Affectionately known by cine-cultists as “Euro-sleaze,” this subset of ’60s and ’70s films freely mixed art and smut.
The Spanish director Jesus Franco ( Vampyros Lesbos, Venus in Furs) has become the most venerated filmmaker among this canon of auteurs, and Strickland expresses affection for Franco’s most fantastical efforts in the erotic realm. “My guess is that the producers would give him the money and as long as he had five or six scenes, they didn’t give a damn what he did in between,” he says. Reflecting new degrees of permissiveness in the wake of the sexual revolution, movies like Franco’s could be at once deplorably exploitative and mesmerizingly decadent. The Duke of Burgundy began life when Strickland was approached with the idea of remaking Lorna the Exorcist, a psychosexual oddity that Franco made in 1974. But Strickland says it became more interesting to situate Euro-sleaze tropes in a drama that was more realistic in psychological and emotional terms.
The Duke of Burgundy deploys two unconventional strategies to achieve that end. One is to suggest that its characters live in a society without men, thereby confounding attempts to read the tale as necessarily gay or straight. Another was to hint that the practices of the film’s lovers — which range from rituals of dominance and resistance to matters involving an, ahem, “human toilet” — were so widespread in their world as to be normal. By doing so, Strickland says, “You take the focus away from the spectacle and onto the dynamics of the relationship.”
As a result, the contents of The Duke of Burgundy may be more potent than the far more strenuous sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Colour and Nymphomaniac, which were both generating buzz as Strickland worked on his feature. “I felt there was no point getting into a competition,” he says. “I’m not saying the directors of those films were, but I thought, ‘Why don’t we just go in the other direction, make it without any nudity and make it seem quite staged and surreal?’ ”
And how subversive for a tribute to a bygone era of onscreen smut to demonstrate the timeless power of suggestion, something that may far exceed any filmmaker’s ability to titillate by more graphic means? Moviegoers may be reminded of that lesson once again if the illicit liaisons between Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey don’t measure up to the scenarios they’ve already imagined. Either way, Linda Ruth Williams is leery of predictions that Fifty Shades of Grey will herald a new permissiveness for Hollywood.
“It will be marketed hard to women who are traditionally more conservative about sexual explicitness so that will be interesting, though the success of the book will make it very easy to get women past the box office.”