Rohmer, Eric, Dreyfus, Jean-Claude, Libolt, Alain, Rosette, Russell, Lucy, Véry, Charlotte	...	(Director)
Grace Elliott, Eric Rohmer	...	(Writer)
Jean-Claude Dreyfus	...	Le duc d'Orléans
Lucy Russell	...	Grace Elliott
Alain Libolt	...	Duc de Biron
Charlotte Véry	...	Pulcherie the Cook
Rosette	...	Fanchette
Léonard Cobiant	...	Champcenetz
François Marthouret	...	Dumouriez
Caroline Morin	...	Nanon
Héléna Dubiel	...	Madame Meyler
Laurent Le Doyen	...	Section Miromesnil: Officer
Georges Benoît	...	Section Miromesnil: President
Serge Wolfsperger	...	Section Miromesnil: Aide
Daniel Tarrare	...	Justin the Doorman
Marie Rivière	...	Madame Laurent
Michel Demierre	...	Chabot

Comments: DFR 186

Summary: Seeing a film by the great Eric Rohmer was once notoriously likened to "watching paint dry"; in the haunting The Lady and the Duke, it's as if paint has come to life. To re-create France in the 1790s, Rohmer staged his intimate scenes against blue screens where his digital footage would be blended with backgrounds from Romantic paintings and eerily pure perspective drawings of 18th-century streets, rooflines, and landscapes. This cost-effective technique pays rich dividends, creating a Masterpiece Theatre-type world of such quaintness, it seems impervious to the bloody Reign of Terror crowding in ever more insistently from just offscreen. That's a rough analogue for the precariously privileged existence of our sympathetic main characters: Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), a Scotswoman relocated to France, and Philippe, duc d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), her close friend and former lover, who's also King Louis XVI's cousin. As in so many Rohmer works, much of the film consists of conversations marking milestones in this pair's now-platonic, yet still intellectually passionate, relationship. But this time the issues truly are life-and-death. --Richard T. Jameson