There’s a startling scene near the beginning of “The Duchess,” in which the teenaged Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley) has intercourse for the first time with her new husband, the much older Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes). Ordered, with dispassionate reserve, to strip naked and lie on the bed, Georgiana trembles with positive terror as her husband enters her with all the wordless efficiency of a man fulfilling a prescribed brief; Knightley’s exquisite face gradually crumbles as it dawns on her that this is how it shall always be.
It’s a brilliantly unsettling bit of visual storytelling — and it’s all the more memorable in retrospect because nothing else in this lavishly appointed historical biopic comes close to matching its emotional honesty or alluring strangeness.
I was never bored watching “The Duchess,” but I was never exactly engaged either. The film has the slick, diverting pull of a glossy magazine article, and goes about that deep. Knightley’s Georgiana is sufficiently sympathetic to carry you with her through the various storytelling hoops, but as the credits rolled, I didn’t feel I knew her at all.
The story of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is simple enough. Forced at 17 into a loveless marriage to a frigid aristocrat, she has but one duty to fulfill: provide the Duke with a male heir. As she repeatedly fails to deliver on this “promise,” bearing only daughters, her increasingly cruel husband engages in a series of barely-concealed affairs, the last of which culminates in an awkward ménage à trois with Georgiana’s former confidante, the disgraced Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell). Georgiana, meanwhile, falls in ill-fated love with handsome future Prime Minister Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper).
Even if you don’t know the history, it’s a familiar narrative with a number of clear reference points, both cinematic and historical, from the story of Marie-Antoinette (especially as told in Sofia Coppola’s impressionistic re-imagining) to that of Georgiana’s own great-great-great-great-niece, Princess Diana (the connection to which has been so crassly emphasized in the film’s marketing here in the UK).
