A woman who studies butterflies and moths tests the limits of her relationship with her lover.
Of course, this is a film you have to meet half-way. If you’re willing to enter its world, it’s an immensely rewarding, amusing, wise, melancholy and involving experience.
It won’t be for everyone, but Burgundy is rich, dark and could well lead to intoxication.
Stagey dialogue and languid pacing make it unlikely The Duke of Burgundy will find a wide audience, but with such magisterial cinematography and an atmosphere all of its own, it deserves one.
So impressive... So perverse.
What Strickland is offering is arguably more refined: a lucid dream of sexual adventure. The title refers to a type of butterfly much loved by Cynthia. To paraphrase Muhammad Ali, this film floats like one, but stings as well.
It's a wondrously bizarre affair, beautiful and baffling by turns.
Strickland's film is rich, pleasurable and multi-layered – to last week's big S&M drama, Fifty Shades of Grey, what an expensive black forest gateau is to a mass-produced vanilla slice.
An odd but strangely beguiling film.
The result is at once erotic, neurotic, fastidious and – notwithstanding the pastiche – utterly individual. What’s more, The Duke of Burgundy is joyously aware of its own preposterousness. This is the mother of all moth movies. Give it a flutter.
Forget Fifty Shades of Grey, there’s only one BDSM-inspired movie worth watching at your local cinema.
Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow from Monday March 2, 2015, until Thursday March 5, 2015. More info: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre/
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Sunday April 5, 2015, until Thursday April 9, 2015. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
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