Melnitz Movies, in co-sponsorship with the Los Angeles Film and TV Office of the French Embassy, presents a tribute to Eric Rohmer, the great French critic and filmmaker who died earlier this month. The Lady and the Duke is based on the memoirs of Grace Elliott, a royalist Englishwoman living perilously in France during the Revolution. The film centers on her affectionate yet tempestuous relationship with Philippe, Duke of Orleans, who was a cousin of King Louis XVI but nonetheless a supporter of revolutionary ideas.

"Rohmer, whose sense of economy has become legendary, shot the film's exteriors on blue-screen backgrounds and superimposed the cast onto painted tableaux inspired by 18th-century engravings. The results are spectacular, recalling early cinema projection techniques and 19th-century magic lantern presentations, as well as the panoramic views of Venetian painting, the canvases of painters like Hubert Robert, and children's slide shows and shadow play, with vague silhouettes seemingly floating against exterior backdrops." -Frederic Bonnaud, FILM COMMENT

a "fascinating antirevolutionary take on the French Revolution" -Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

"In opposition both to the intensely personal, confessional tone of much of the work of Truffaut and to the politically provocative films of Godard, Mr. Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet Mr. Rohmer’s work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films." -Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES

DIRECTOR: Eric Rohmer
WRITERS: Grace Elliott, Eric Rohmer
CAST: Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Lucy Russell
In French with English subtitles
129 min