The Duchess: Keira Knightley is British
Click to watch the trailer for The Duchess at Zuguide.com
In the long awaited follow-up to the 2004 biopic King Arthur, Keira Knightley is demoted from her position as Queen when Clive Owen is struck by one of the plague-infested corpses catapulted over his castle walls by an invading army, inflicting him with the dreaded coma/plague combo. Distraught by her love’s irreversible predicament, Knightley, formerly a fearless Celtic warrior, changes her name from Guinevere to Georgiana and moves to Devonshire to distract herself from her sorrows with a potent mix of frivolous luxury, illicit love affairs, and uncontrollable gambling.
* Editor’s note: Although this film doesn’t actually exist, it is remarkably similar to Knightley’s latest feature, The Duchess. Just disregard the parts about the launching of rudimentary biological weapons and any connection whatsoever to the King Arthur legend.
Back to reality:
The trailer for The Duchess opens with Keira Knightley being led through the gates and courtyard of an immense palace in a horse-drawn carriage. Announced as the “Empress of Fashion,” she makes a grand entrance and appears at the edge of a balcony overlooking a ballroom full of adoring members of the aristocracy. The next scene shows her walking gracefully toward the camera with a large display of candles illuminating her Bride of Frankenstein hairdo. After Knightley bows before Ralph Fiennes, the Duke, a voiceover suggests that she may be struggling with her duties, including providing her husband with a son. We then see Fiennes sitting at a banquet table with a scowl on his face before transitioning to a brief image of Knightley meeting up with Dominic Cooper, who plays Earl Grey, beside a goose-filled pond. Heading back inside, Knightley asks the godfather of the world’s most delicious tea about his true feelings for her, but not before she gets a super-perm and dons a Three Muskteers-inspired hat covered with feathers and a foxtail. The rest of the trailer shows Knightley struggling with her desire to find love outside of a cold marriage and fighting a losing battle against a series of increasingly uncomfortable hairstyles. My favorite part of the trailer is listening to Knightley’s hypeman pump up the standing room only crowd just before she makes her first appearance at the palace. The Duchess opens September 19, 2008. Check out The Duchess trailer at Zuguide.com.
