A Revolution in Pictures

pretty <i>lady</i>: Lady Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell, left) surveys 18th-century Paris.

pretty lady: Lady Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell, left) surveys 18th-century Paris.

Eric Rohmer beats the young Turks at their own digital game.

by Sam Adams

If it’s true that digital effects are killing movies, it’s only in the way that medicines can be fatal if improperly administered. While they’ve been technically perfected to the point that at least certain small-scale computer-generated objects are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, no more than a handful of movies have exploited the most significant technological advance since the dawn of multi-channel sound for anything more interesting than virtual reality. Even digital animation, for the most part, is obsessed with creating “realistic” textures for the surfaces of slimy-skinned ogres and purple-haired monsters. Creativity being, to a certain extent, inversely proportional to budget, it’s not surprising that filmmakers are forced into such mundane uses of potentially limitless tools. But it’s dispiriting, like watching a chef step into a fully stocked kitchen and whip up a can of cream of mushroom soup.

CQ, with its arsenal of organic in-camera effects, might be the first anti-digital movie, a postmodern tribute to doing things the old-fashioned way. The Lady and the Duke, whose director, Eric Rohmer, was 80 when he filmed it, takes almost the opposite approach to arrive at the same end. Based on the diaries of British expatriate Grace Elliott, the film is set in Paris on the eve of, and during, the French Revolution. Rather than build elaborate sets or seek those obscure corners where the architecture has remained more or less unchanged, Rohmer takes the bold and marvelous step of digitally inserting his characters into painted re-creations of Paris in the late 18th century. Jean-Baptiste Marot's backgrounds are, at times, audaciously impressionistic, at others close to realist, but always with a shallowness of field that enhances rather than conceals their oil-and-canvas origins. Rohmer stages a good portion of the action indoors, so as to avoid having his actors play every scene at the lip of the stage, but the net effect is to reimagine history as artifice, and as art.

In some ways, the rest of the film is conventional, almost groaningly so. Lady Elliott (Lucy Russell, best known for a role in Christopher Nolan's Following) and the Duke of Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) engage in endless conversations about the changing state of things, and not surprisingly they find their lives threatened and their worldviews shaken by the impending upheaval of the social order. And given his predilection for erudite characters bound by their own intellectualism, it's not surprising that Rohmer is, if not on the royalists' side, at least deeply sympathetic to their situation. The duke is the more pompous and willfully ignorant of the two, but in Dreyfus' characterization, he's more like a slow-moving, slightly grumpy bear than a dedicated enemy of the proletariat. Indeed, there's something rarefied about the whole enterprise, which might seem to limit the film's appeal. (That might be why its distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, has uncharacteristically declined to screen the film for local press; rather than re-watch such a visually resplendent film on videotape, I've relied on my notes from the screening at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival.) But The Lady and the Duke is more than a chamber piece, and more than a technological curiosity. Among other things, it proves that youth doesn't have a monopoly on innovation, that old dogs can learn new tricks. Let's hope a few young dogs have the wisdom to learn them as well.