PRINCESS Diana's wistful comment "there were three of us in this marriage" echoed a situation in her family 200 years ago when the Duke of Devonshire – married to the beautiful Lady Georgiana Spencer – maintained a ménage à trois that caused scandal
in Britain. But in the 18th-century version, the duke and duchess were both infatuated with the duchess's close friend, Lady Bess Foster.
This was a social world that seemed based on a kind of distaff agriculture: one sustained one's expensive estate by breeding progeny then marrying them off to rich people. At the start of The Duchess, William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) is shown selecting 17-year-old Georgiana (Keira Knightley) from a herd of girls outside with all the ardour of a farmer at market. Their wedding is a contract: the Duke can have a mistress, several in fact, and illegitimate children he expects to be "accommodated" within the family, but only once his wife has given him the male heir necessary to carry on the family line is she free to do as she pleases.
Unsupported in a cold and loveless marriage, Georgiana throws herself into society instead. Adored by men and envied by women, her every flirtation and fashion is amplified, and often invented, by vicious lively newspapers. The story sounds very familiar to today's reader, yet director Saul Dibb doesn't overemphasise the Princess Diana parallels.
In its own way, however, this is a warm-hearted film that bends over backwards to be sympathetic to its Duchess, to the point that it can barely acknowledge her flaws. The real Georgiana tied herself into her loveless marriage by incurring phenomenal gambling debts, but the film underplays her addiction. And while she is presented as something of a political muse as well as a social clotheshorse, Georgiana's role was more electioneer than revolutionary idealist. A close friend of Marie Antoinette, she doesn't want to undermine the system and send the wig-wearers in tumbrels to Madame Guillotine, but simply open up access to security and respect a degree or two.
Still, the political cut and thrust is vigorously presented; even if Simon McBurney's statesman Charles Fox takes his name a bit literally, constantly gazing upon "G" as if eyeing up a particularly plump chicken.
Mind you, the Duchess is quite a dish; no one in this picture is busier than Knightley. You could fill galleries with her animated self poses. Defiant, jaw-jutting, beseeching eyes, devilish grins and angrily furrowed brows are all present. I don't know if this is the same as charm, but she's dynamic and entertaining as hell. This is Knightley's most assured performance to date, giving a sense of emotional reality to Georgiana. Yet the most notorious aspect of her life, sharing her husband with Lady Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), seems a bit muffled.
Infiltrating a marriage and yet keeping on friendly terms with both husband and wife is a formidable piece of social manipulation, and the film further suggests that it is Bess, not her husband, who teaches Georgiana how to find real pleasure in sex. So it's frustrating that once she has seduced both the Duke and Duchess in separate bedchambers, the film seems content to dump Bess off at the breakfast table, equidistant from both.
By default, the film gets nicked by Ralph Fiennes as the dour Duke more interested in sleeping with Bess, seducing the maids or feeding his dogs than spending time with his wife. Given the Duke's universally acknowledged reputation as a boor and a bore, Fiennes is quite brilliant at giving a limited character some subtle shadings. At times, his command of the social set-up is blackly comic, as when a piteously drunk Georgiana disgraces herself at a ball by staggering into a lit candelabra which sets her towering horsehair wig ablaze. "Please put out Her Grace's hair," instructs the Duke, departing swiftly for another room. In other scenes, his unshakeable belief in the aristocratic code results in brutishly bleak behaviour, yet Fiennes manages to twine these qualities and make them credible.
On general release from Friday
The full article contains 701 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
