The Duchess

Of course, a movie starring Kiera Knightly is always going to be visually interesting, but this film ended up being surprisingly dissatisfying. It may be that I'm not a fan of the genre of modern Romance, which is what this movie ended up being. In Northrop Frye's terms, Romance has the structure of comedy (disorder to order), plus exotic settings and interesting noble characters.

This picture, instead, played up the "modern Romance" conventions one sees in such books as Shogun, Gaijin, and the Thorn Birds. The "main characters" have lives that never turn out well; it does not end in relationship, but in a kind of stasis. In the Thorn Birds, for example, the great lovers are torn apart by the calling of the male character, having only one night together. In Gaijin, the putative hero dies of his wounds relatively early on in the novel, leaving no character focus.

In the same way, The Duchess not only compresses the heroine's love life into a few weeks in Bath, it falsifies history as well. In history, the duchess's affair lasted for years.

I'm beginning to believe that there's something to Frye's (and Aristotle's) contention that the actual structures and archetypes of literature carry a special meaning.