Rohmer: The Lady and the Duke

I've been a fan of Eric Rohmer's films for a long time. He's another master of the little film about ordinary people, well ordinary French people. Generally the setting is contemporary, the plots are rather minimal, and the action revolves around the various relationships and sexual attractions among the characters. My all time favorites are probably My Night at Maude's (1969) and Pauline at the Beach (1983), but I've enjoyed all his movies, all I've seen anyway. They have that amusing combination of silliness and seriousness that somehow seems quite genuine to me.

For all of those reasons, I was curious to see what one of his later films, The Lady and the Duke (2001) would be like. This one is a costume drama set in the 1790s, just after the French Revolution. And it's well done. The central focus is on the relationship between the Duke of Orleans and his former mistress, Grace Elliott, an English woman of Irish descent who has taken up residence in Paris, where she remains friends with the Duke and his circle of aristocratic friends, most of whom are sympathetic supporters of the revolution. It's an interesting story, with the plot revolving around the revolution's descent into terror, and the eventual arrest and execution of most of the French aristocracy, including those, like the Duke of Orleans, who thought their revolutionary sympathies would shield them.

There are certain Rohmeresque qualities to the film, particularly in the characters of the Duke, played by Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Grace Elliott, who is marvelously portrayed by Lucy Russell. It's really her film; she appears in every scene, and the story revolves around her adventures and the danger she faces remaining in Paris and nearby in her house in the countryside. But what I found most interesting and even compelling about the story, was the way the Duke and Grace are caught up in the politics of the Revolution. Although Grace sympathizes with the deposed monarch and his family, the Duke professes to be a patriot and a staunch supporter of liberty and the revolutionaries. By the opening scene, in 1790, it's probably already too late for either of them to escape from Paris, but neither is inclined to take any action. The danger waxes and wanes over the next few years, until finally coming to a moment of crisis in 1793 with the decision of the revolutionary assembly, in which the Duke continues to play a leading role, to execute the king.

Eventually, as the terror progresses, the Duke himself is taken into custody, finally realizing that he has no control over the politics of the situation, despite his professed sympathies and patriotism. Moreover, he sees that there is nothing he can do to protect Grace, whose position in society and association with the Duke make her suspect as well. The movie is, in fact, a study in the effects of the terror. Rohmer captures both the obvious horrors, decapitated heads on pikes, and the somehow more chilling qualities of the oafish French lower classes who have taken control of the situation and elevated themselves into positions of authority. Some of these so-called "citizens" retain their humanity, some do not, or perhaps have little or none in the first place. This is the dark and bloody side of democracy, rule of the people. Some people are, alas, little more than brutes, driven largely by simple and base appetites. When these are given liberty and made equal to their brothers, they quickly give license to their basest inclinations.

There is a lesson in these historic moments of the people expressing their desires for equality and liberty, in the 1790s in Paris, in the 1930s in Berlin. When the little people who have been kept down see a way to get even and address their assorted grievances, things can get very ugly very quickly. And it always seems to begin while those who are standing by remain in denial, shrugging their shoulders and asking each other "how bad can it be?" By the time they have the answer to that question, the little people have begun rounding them up, or perhaps just knocking them about when they don't raise their hands to salute quickly enough. Unfortunately, there is a flaw in democracy; it requires an educated and informed polity. It seems to work fairly well on a small scale, when everyone knows one another and has a stake in the outcomes. But even then, as Socrates observed, there is the potential for perversion and demagoguery. On the larger scale, the dangers are always greater, the tribal, ethnic, racial and religious fears and hatreds always lurking just beneath the surface to inflame grievances and provoke calls for unity and revenge.

I wonder if we are not going to witness another such moment now in the twenty teens here in these once United States? Those who collaborate with tyrants and autocrats always believe they can control them, but they frequently end up on an enemies list, or beneath the guillotine, or dangling from a rope, or shot as traitors to the revolution. But, we tell ourselves, things aren't so bad. It's just a few angry people, a few acting out. Nothing like that can happen here. Well, there was that unpleasantness in the 1860s, and some people got killed back in the 1960s, but by and large we're a peaceful nation. We just need a strong leader to arise and make us great again!