Home > The Magazine > Arts

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

All she needs is love

Deborah Ross

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

The Duchess
12A, Nationwide

The Duchess is probably no more than a most handsomely mounted costume drama which is no bad thing if you happen to like handsomely mounted costume dramas, and I do, I do, I do! Lavishly directed by Saul Dibb, whose previous work (the gritty London film Bullet Boy; the TV drama series The Line of Beauty) I liked a great deal, it has stupendous frocks, ravishing hats and more stately homes than you could shake a stick at, not that I’d advise shaking a stick at a stately home. These days, security will have you off the property before you can even buy a tea-towel in the shop, and then what will you have to show for your day out? It also has its Colin Firth moment — is this now obligatory? — in the form of Dominic Cooper in a big, floaty white shirt, half undone. I can’t actually see what more you would want, costume drama wise, although if you want less I can highly recommend The Other Boleyn Girl, which offers a lot less of everything.

Based on Amanda Foreman’s best-selling biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire — an ancestor of Diana Spencer, and parallels are drawn — the film opens at Althorp in 1774. Here, 17-year-old Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley), with hair whipped higher than Marge Simpson’s, frolics with some girlfriends on the lawn, while her mother (the always unsettling Charlotte Rampling) sits in the house brokering a deal for Georgiana to marry the much older Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes). Georgiana, in her youth and optimism, imagines he loves her and Georgiana is very interested in love but, once married, she finds nothing could interest him less. He wants only a male heir. Beyond that, he is only interested in his dogs, bedding his maidservants and then bedding Georgiana’s best and only friend, Lady Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), who comes to live with them in a ménage à trois. There are three of us in this marriage, and so on. Whatever love means, and so on.

1 | 2 Next page

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

A perfect cadence

Stephen Pettitt

This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday.

Forgotten wonders

Andrew Lambirth

Byzantium 330-1454
Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009

Out of the ordinary

Carolyn Bartholomew

Carolyn Bartholomew talks to Tilda Swinton, an actor who has made a career out of being unconventional

Life lessons

Kate Chisholm

Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod.

Apocalypse now

James Delingpole

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks.

Don’t confuse conversation with dialogue or quips

Catherine Blyth

Catherine Blyth says that conversation is an art: its essence is the acrobatic business of reading and changing minds — talking with people, not at them