Georgian England. A society lady raises her pistol to duel with her aristocratic mentor over a grave insult.
Duelling had rules, and Satisfaction is built out of them. The parties arrive on the field of honour at the agreed hour. Each brings a second, who inspects and loads the pistols. The offended party may still accept an apology, and is asked. Otherwise: back to back, five paces, turn, fire on the signal. Honour may be considered satisfied at first blood, if the injured party says it is. The whole ceremony exists to give both people a way out, and the joke of the film is that the woman holding the pistol keeps declining to take it.
Based in Georgian England, a society lady raises her pistol to duel with her aristocratic mentor over a grave insult. The film is inspired by real events and creates the opportunity to portray women in a situation we typically see enacted by men.
The grave insult, when it finally arrives, is worth the seven minutes. At tea, one of them told the company that the other was five and thirty when she is two and twenty. In a marriage market where a woman's age set her price, that is sabotage rather than gossip, which is why the apology, when it comes, has to be published to the whole town rather than whispered on the field.
Scripted by Christopher Buckley, an actor known for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which had a blockbuster west end run. He heavily researched the period arriving at an unusual form of period slang. It stars Gwyneth Keyworth (Misfits, Alex Rider, Aaron Sorkin's To Kill a Mockingbird), Michelle Moran (Into the Badlands, Doctors), Ellie Gallimore and Mia Khan.
The slang is the other pleasure. Pistols are barkers. They are checked and primed and they make good clean holes, and an insult is delivered in a register the audience has to lean into rather than a modern line in fancy dress. Duels between women were rare but not unknown in eighteenth-century Europe, and the film plays the form absolutely straight rather than for parody.
Won funding from Center frame and had a BAFTA and BIFA qualifying festival run including Rhode Island and Bolton among others. Both Bailey Tom Bailey and Christopher Buckley appear in Yoreflix Stories, our interview series in this catalogue.