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"  When Princess Diana learned to use her celebrity as a form of power and consolation for a loveless marriage, she was following in the 200-year-old footsteps of her famous ancestor Lady Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire. Diana outmaneuvered her furious inlaws, but as a gorgeous, gripping new film makes clear, Georgiana faced much tougher odds. The Duchess boasts a cast at the top of its game: Keira Knightley, giving her most passionate, unaffected performance yet in the title role; Ralph Fiennes as the rich, chilly duke she&amp;#039;s married off to at 16; Hayley Atwell as his live-in mistress, Lady Bess; Dominic Cooper as Georgiana&amp;#039;s eventual lover; the English character actor Simon McBurney as her favorite politician; and the wonderful Charlotte Rampling, trading her older-woman French sexiness for aristocratic English froideur as the duchess&amp;#039;s mostly disapproving mum. But the movie&amp;#039;s real revelation is the fast-rising British director Saul Dibb, whose only previous feature is a gritty urban tale of black-on-black violence called Bullet Boy (2004), which never reached American screens. Back in the day, costume dramas were the studios&amp;#039; prestige offerings. Now too many play like Harlequin novels on film: all eye candy, soft-core sex, and comfy escapism. Not this one. The Duchess is certainly beautiful, and it doesn&amp;#039;t stint on romance, but Dibb uses Georgiana&amp;#039;s story to explore what it means for a woman to be powerless over the most urgent and intimate areas of her life. The result is lush entertainment that&amp;#039;s also insightful and wrenching and strikes a contemporary chord. Drawing on Amanda Foreman&amp;#039;s terrific 1998 biography, Dibb presents Georgiana as the first English mega-celebrity. In the eighteenth century, people were starstruck by the nobility\u2014we see them running alongside the wedding carriage for a glimpse of the duke and his bride. But like her royal French contemporary Marie Antoinette, Georgiana took stardom to a whole new level. She designed many of her luxurious outfits, and the artful results set off fashion crazes every time she appeared in public. Unlike her husband, she was also warm, unpretentious, and engaging. To the horror of her fellow aristocrats, she had the common touch, using it to campaign for the liberal opposition Whig party, which championed the American Revolution and loathed George III. Tapping into her movie-star charisma, Knightley makes these scenes incandescent; when sporting liberty colors and a fabulous hat, she steps out on a scaffold and greets the crowd below with an exuberant joke, you feel the same thrill they do. Inevitably, Dibb streamlines his heroine (it&amp;#039;s worth reading the book afterward to see the juicy stuff he left out). But her intelligence and passion are summed up in a pungent exchange between the new duchess, presiding over her first political dinner, and the Whig leader (McBurney), who becomes her lifelong friend. When he says the party supports &amp;quot;freedom in moderation,&amp;quot; Georgiana gives him a quizzical look, then swoops in for the kill, noting that freedom, like death, is an absolute, and to speak of either in moderation is nonsense.  Freedom is Dibb&amp;#039;s real subject, and instead of preaching he locates the still revolutionary principles of individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the duchess&amp;#039;s love for her children and for Cooper&amp;#039;s fiery young Whig idealist Charles Grey (who eventually became prime minister and, legend has it, the earl for whom the well-known tea is named). These loves don&amp;#039;t mesh, of course. If Prince Charles chose the 19-year-old Diana for her virginity, the fifth Duke of Devonshire married his teenage bride largely for dynastic reasons. He&amp;#039;s outraged when Georgiana produces daughters instead of the desired heir, yet he&amp;#039;s quick to use her children as a chain to bind her after he installs his mistress in their home. A great actor, Fiennes is a marvel of understatement here, as a man so complacently blinkered he can&amp;#039;t even see his own ruthlessness. As he informs his wife at the start of one of the movie&amp;#039;s most hair-raising scenes, he has all the power and she has none. He&amp;#039;s right, but his prisoner has a gift that remains beyond his reach. Dibb punctuates The Duchess with recurring images of the joy in freedom that isn&amp;#039;t just part of human nature but a fundamental need: three beautifully framed aerial views of impulsive play, all of them involving youth. In the last one, two trapped women are able to cast off their chains long enough to laugh like fools as they chase their children around a fountain, pursuing happiness. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a9267/loves-labour-lost-19689/>