In how many languages can you say “boring”?

I was quite looking forward to seeing this movie. European history is perhaps one of the most interesting topics to observe from every perspective: it is a mess of political turmoil and sexual deviancies. People have been making period films forever for a reason.

The Duchess of Devonshire is among some of the most famous female figures throughout English history. She was notoriously popular, and though I did not know much more than that about her, I was anxious to see this movie and be shown why (dramatically of course) she was so famous.

This movie told me nothing. They showed that she was more rebellious than other women of her time, but there were women who acted in the same manner and are not so well-known, so I had to assume there was more behind her fame than that.

The few glimpses into her political gave me a glimpse of why she was is so well-known. However, these few scenes were so shrouded in melodrama that the audience fails to appreciate them fully.

Though the movie covers a good deal of her life, I found the constant jumping around disjointed and distant. Getting attached to the characters was quite difficult in this constantly shifting environment.

What I gathered was that this movie was an attempt to make another Marie Antoinette (2006 film) without the modern twists. However this retrospection on life in . It attempted to emphasize her gambling problems and drug abuse in a few random, glimpsing scenes. The one moment she was supposed to be high was intended to convey that she combated with addiction. I was given the impression that she was under the influence on a single occasion. If I had not watched the portion of the DVD extras with a mini-biography of the Duchess, I would have been completely unaware of what they were attempting to convey.

They attempted to show her extravagances subtly, but unfortunately they were portrayed in such a subliminal and uninteresting fashion that the scenes simply turned into distractions from the storyline.

Overall, their attempts to show her turbulent lifestyle only resulted in a Lifetime-esque period drama which focused on her unstable marriage and forbidden love affair. Her marriage and its complications were very interesting in idea and memory, but were made completely monotonous by unspirited acting.

The performances were overall lifeless, something I blame mainly on the director Saul Dibb. I have seen Ralph Fiennes in other films before and he is quite a good actor. I can not imagine what he was doing in a mess like this. I concede that the Duke of Devonshire was a cold man but there is a certain art to being stoic in an interesting way and Fiennes did not tap into this technique. His very presence on the screen made me yawn. Keira Knightly had her spirited moments, but overall they beat her abilities into something flat. As for all the supporting actors, I barely acknowledged them, for performances that forgettable hardly deserve mentioning. Perhaps they were trying to emphasize how open the Duchess was in the callous world of English aristocracy, but unfortunately that artistic touch does not make a good movie.

The quality of this film only redeems itself in its visuals, which are, in a word, spectacular. It seems that The Duchess has fallen into the same trap that brings about the downfall of many period films: The makers were too concerned with the costuming and the surroundings to see the repairable flaws in the story and the acting. Perhaps if the story and acting were approached with as much enthusiasm as the cinematography, then we would have had a successful movie on our hands.