The Duchess

Director: Saul Dibb.
With: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes.
Released: September 5

The Duchess delves into the loveless marriage of a party-going fashion icon (Keira Knightley) and a stuffy older man (Ralph Fiennes) who just happens to be one of the wealthiest nobles in the country. So maybe it's not surprising that the film's publicity has focused on the parallels between its 18th century heroine, Georgiana Spencer, and her 20th century descendant, Diana. Photos of the "people's princess" keep cropping up in trailers for The Duchess, and the poster even paraphrases one of Diana's most notorious soundbites: "There were three people in her marriage."

The story is that the Duke of Devonshire has no interest in his gauche teenage bride except in her ability to provide him with a son and heir. When she fails to do so, his attentions wander to her friend Bess Foster, played by Hayley Atwell (Cassandra's Dream, Brideshead Revisited). Meanwhile, Georgiana consoles herself by spending time with a young politician and future prime minister, Charles Grey, played by Dominic Cooper (The History Boys, Mamma Mia).

Prince Charles's infamous qualification of his feelings for Diana—"whatever love means"—rears its head when the Duke claims to love his wife "in the way I understand love". But otherwise the screenplay keeps any analogies with Charles and Di to a minimum. Indeed, the film itself has so little to do with their relationship that the publicity starts to look a bit suspect—a shifty attempt to make a historical drama seem contemporary when it's actually a familiar Merchant Ivory-style parade of stately homes and horse-drawn carriages, wigs, frocks and breeches. In short, it's National Trust cinema.

Sofia Coppola's recent Marie Antoinette told an almost identical story. But while that film splashed 1980s pop songs on the soundtrack, and revelled in the candy-coloured excess of the production design, The Duchess is almost as tightly bound by convention as its characters are, even though its director, Saul Dibb, got the job after making Bullet Boy, a hard-hitting depiction of Hackney gun crime.

Still, as conventional as it might be, The Duchess is a handsome, impeccably acted example of the kind of film Britain does best. Fiennes is a master of conveying both stony contempt and the pitiable awkwardness beneath it with nothing more than a thin-lipped half-smile. And Knightley is far better suited to corseted period drama than she is to special-effects-packed action movies. Thanks mainly to its stars, The Duchess is always watchable, but its idea of the historical drama genre is pretty historical itself.

Nicholas Barber