Right when the awards season came to an end and we were afraid of the usual post-Oscars lull, the first great film of 2015 was waiting in our screens, kicking a new year of cinema in style. Reaffirming the unique personality of one of Britain’s most distinctive new filmmakers, Peter Stickland’s third feature ‘The Duke Of Burgundy’, almost ironically named as the male species of one of the moths its main character studies, depicts the decadently refined world of a lady dedicated to entomological studies living in a countryside mansion with her maid, engaged in a mistress and servant role-playing relationship where things are not what they seem.
From the first scene our sense of voyeurism is teased as we are allowed to gaze into the couple’s meticulously staged intimate practices; the maid being humiliated for her “negligent services” by her perfectly groomed and dressed up mistress. A repetition of that initial scene begins shaping up a pattern of everyday routines and slowly unveils the particulars of their bizarre partnership, in which the submissive part writes a detailed list of rules to prepare her lover for each of their encounters, showing an insatiable appetite for exploring the boundaries of her fetish and S&M interests (Human toilet anyone?) and using the code word ‘Pinastri’ (another type of moth) when she reaches the limit of her pleasurable punishment. Meanwhile, her increasing demands suffocate the apparently more assertive entomologist, making her feel as framed by the constraints of their relationships as the insects pinned down to a board she collects.