The Duke of Burgundy (2015)

cards and requesting increasingly elaborate punishments. What begins as a delicious private game gradually becomes domestic labour for Cynthia. She wants cuddles, conversation and an ordinary night in bed; Evelyn wants polished boots, cold commands and confinement in a locked trunk. Even their academic world of butterfly and moth lectures becomes tangled in jealousy when Evelyn gives another woman’s footwear rather too much attention. Resentment builds through tiny changes in their repeated ritual until a birthday celebration turns into a painfully awkward battle over who is serving whom, and one session pushes beyond the emotional boundaries they thought they understood. Strickland shoots all this with the feverish glamour of vintage erotica, complete with soft focus, fetish objects, mirrored images and a hallucinatory storm of moths, yet the sting is surprisingly tender. Beneath the kinky theatre lies a painfully recognisable relationship: one lover needs a fantasy to feel desired, while the other keeps performing it because she is terrified that simple affection will not be enough. It is slow, peculiar and sometimes very funny, but it lands as a melancholy portrait of love becoming repetitive work.

The setting exists outside normal history: an all-female European enclave with bicycles, handwritten instructions, antique furniture and scholarly lectures, but scarcely a modern object in sight. Its costumes, music and visual tricks deliberately evoke the louche Euro-erotica of the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly the films of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin, without assigning the story a firm year or country. Shot in Hungary around Sopron, Leányfalu, Budapest and the surrounding woodland, it turns old streets, autumn forests and an ivy-covered country house into a sealed little universe. Cabinets of pinned insects, dark studies, ornate bedrooms and hushed lecture halls give it the atmosphere of a private finishing school for glamorous lesbian lepidopterists. The vibe is sensuous rather than steamy, dreamlike rather than realistic: half fetish melodrama, half deadpan domestic comedy, with the haunting Cat’s Eyes score making every stocking, moth wing and creaking trunk feel loaded with secret meaning.

Sidse Babett Knudsen is magnificent as Cynthia, statuesque and devastating in severe dresses, high heels and hosiery, yet most affecting when the dominatrix mask slips and reveals an exhausted, insecure woman underneath. Chiara D’Anna gives Evelyn a petite, dark-eyed allure that moves between kittenish submission and quietly tyrannical appetite; she can make kneeling at a woman’s boots look both vulnerable and alarmingly bossy. Their chemistry is intimate, funny and sad rather than conventionally torrid. Despite all the talk of punishment, face-sitting, lingerie, domination and an implied golden shower, there is no nudity and little graphic sexual action—the juiciest business happens offscreen or through suggestion. This is fetish cinema for viewers who know that anticipation, costume and power can be far sexier than acres of exposed flesh.

In a Dom – Sub relationship, who holds the actual power? You’ll be surprised. Day in and day out, lesbian lovers Cynthia and Evelyn enact an elaborate sadomasochistic D&S fantasy as mistress and maid. But as their ritual of domination and submission begins to turn stale, the dominant Cynthia starts getting tired of the same daily repetitive game and yearns for something more conventional, more comforting. But the submissive Evelyn needs her masochistic kicks and tries to push their taboos even further.

Beautiful Aesthetics, Brilliant Acting and Captivating Cinematography!!