Duke of Burgundy: 5 reasons it spanks Fifty Shades

(Image credit: Duke of Burgundy)

published 20 February 2015

Hot on the heels of the mega-successful release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, comes another S&M tale with a twist, The Duke of Burgundy. Directed by Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio) this wry erotic film, starring Borgen's Sidse Babett Knudsen and the Italian actress Chiara d'Anna, tells the story of a female butterfly professor and her lover who act out a ritual of dominance and submission.

But while Fifty Shades of Grey has been a major box office hit, it has received less than stellar reviews from many critics, with some labelling it a "spanking bore" and "Cinderella porn". Reviewers on the other hand have gone wild for The Duke of Burgundy. So what does this film do better than Fifty Shades?

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"Peter Strickland's wryly subversive S&M fantasy is everything that Fifty Shades of Grey isn't," says Geoffrey MacNab in The Independent. It is a gorgeously shot, old-fashioned, Sixties-style European art-house movie that pays exhaustive, fetishistic attention to texture, sound and touch –the squeak of leather, the rustling of the wind through the trees, the smoothness of the silk lingerie. MacNab calls the film: "a wondrously bizarre affair, beautiful and baffling by turns".

There's a lot bubbling beneath the psychological surface in The Duke of Burgundy, which is something I can't say about "Fifty Shades" with a straight face, says Brett Arnold of Business Insider. "Fifty Shades" is far more on the nose and lacks any and every subtlety that the far sexier "Burgundy" employs. The kinks in "Burgundy" are also far more bizarre than the blasé whips, belts, and ropes in "Shades", says Arnold. "Strickland has a unique flair for visuals that somehow makes an audience enjoy something completely out of their comfort zone."

"Lepidopterists are fluttering with excitement over The Duke of Burgundy," says Patrick Barkham in The Guardian, and "not just because of its billing as a lesbian arthouse Fifty Shades of Grey." The Duke of Burgundy is Britain's second-most endangered butterfly and butterflies are a repeated visual motif in the film. In this all-female tale, even the character of the dominatrix butterfly professor is called Cynthia, which is the scientific name for the 'painted lady' butterfly.

This is "the thinking person's Fifty Shades of Grey", says Kate Muir in The Times. Even in an age when S&M films are spreading like an unfortunate rash this "elegant, witty, mysterious piece of bedroom philosophy" is a delight. Its greatest pleasure, says Muir, is the "silk and satin lingerie not seen since the classic days of Hollywood" and costumes reminiscent of "a Sixties' Belle de Jour". There is no nudity and no swearing in this film, and director Strickland says he wanted to do something different from S&M whips and leather in order "to celebrate the glamour of older women, that European aura of Catherine Deneuve or Charlotte Rampling".

"Recently we've seen a film about BDSM driven by dead-eyed commercial imperative," says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But Strickland's Duke of Burgundy, is different, "it is a labour of love, whereas Fifty Shades of Grey was a labour of money". The movie inhales the lost aroma of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Joseph Losey's The Servant, but Strickland is not sending anything up, says Bradshaw, he is doing it for real. His Cynthia and Evelyn are far more rewarding than "daytime soapers Christian Grey and Ana Steele".