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The Baroness and the Pig Directed and written by Michael MacKenzie Starring Patricia Clarkson, Caroline Dhavernas and Colm Feore Classification: 14A Rating: * *

Handsome to look at, hard to digest, The Baroness and the Pig is an allegorical costume drama that feels something like Pygmalion (Pigmalion?) as adapted by Peter Greenaway. The film shares Greenaway's production designer, Ben van Os, and his penchant for titled chapters, technology and dialogue about culture. With apparent narrative influences from Henry James to François Truffaut's The Wild Child to Jean Genet's The Maids, the film is fairly dry chewing. More fun might have been expected in a story about a young woman who grows up in a pig sty to serve in a fancy French kitchen.

Produced by Daniel Langlois (founder of Montreal's Oscar-winning special-effects company Softimage), The Baroness was directed and written by Michael MacKenzie (based on his own play). The story is history shot through a modern lens and a discernible filter of contemporary condescension. The film was shot in high-definition video (as was Eric Rohmer's costume picture, The Lady and the Duke), and features a score by Philip Glass. The choices are intended to encourage detachment, not a Merchant-Ivory immersion into the story.

The performances, fortunately, are generally down-to-earth, with ever-versatile Patricia Clarkson ( Far from Heaven, The Station Agent) bringing an appealing warmth to the role. Also particularly good is her English butler, Soames (Bernard Hepton), who seems to have wandered in from a P.G. Wodehouse story, ready with an arsenal of sardonic quips.

The year is 1887, and Clarkson plays a wealthy Philadelphia woman who has married an English baron (played by a hollow-cheeked Colm Feore) and moved to Paris. Like those Jamesian heroines, she has pluck, optimism, cash flow and boundless naiveté about the twisted schemes of the burned-out leftovers of the European aristocracy. After she has paid off her husband's debts, he starts in a new business, selling purported Italian masterpieces to the French. This means he's out of town a great deal and the baroness, with time on her hands, decides to open a salon.

Raised as a Quaker, the baroness is an egalitarian by instinct and is especially enthusiastic about what opportunities new technology such as electrical light will offer the poor. She believes that "culture should be for everyone" and has adorned her home with everything that's scientific and modern, from phonographs to Impressionist paintings. Her pièce de résistance will be the rehabilitation of a feral young woman (Caroline Dhavernas), whom she has found living in a pig sty. The conversion of Emily from sow to servant proves surprisingly easy, as the young woman soon learns to walk upright, talk and announce guests at the door and listen raptly to Shakespeare. Except for a nagging case of eczema around her mouth, and the odd lapse (she eats coal and sleeps under her bed), Emily is a model housekeeper.

The baroness has tougher battles to face with the French aristocracy, represented by the sneering duchess (Louise Marleau), who favours elaborate furniture, costume balls and sexual decadence worthy of the ancien régime. The duchess is also the baron's biggest client and takes an intense dislike to the upstart American. If his wife persists in her modern follies, she warns the baron, they'll both suffer.

Marital tensions increase and the baroness begins to notice that her husband is not the nice guy she thought he was. By the film's second act, he is so irredeemably evil that it seems a great oversight that he has no mustache to twirl. When not enjoying pornography or swindling customers, he's busy raping the household staff. What can the poor baroness do but turn to barnyard justice?

The film's transition from allegory to melodrama doesn't make it any more convincing, just a bit more exciting. The falseness at the film's core comes from the uncritical assumption that the present is wiser than the past. The baroness isn't so much a period character as a time traveller from our enlightened times, trying to teach the swine of a century ago how to stop grunting and walk upright.

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