The Baroness and the Pig - Mobile Edition

Movie Reviews
The Baroness and the Pig
By Hervé St-Louis
September 18, 2004 - 11:22

Studios: Film Tonic, Media Principia, Wide Angle Pictures
Writer(s): Michael MacKenzie
Starring: Patricia Clarkson, Caroline Dhavernas, Colm Feore, Bernard Hepton, Louise Marleau, Benoît Brière
Directed by: Michael MacKenzie
Running Time: 95 minutes
Release Date: 8 September, 2002
Distributors: Film1

The Baroness and the pig is about a rich American heiress marrying into old European aristocracy who adopts an “enfant sauvage,” a child abandoned a birth and raised with farm pigs. For the Baroness, the servant turned “Pig” is an example used in her a modern Parisian salon to display the 19th Century’s scientific achievement and progressiveness.

Although with a limited cast, characters are used as archetypes to explain Fin de SiPcle Paris and the restrictions and prejudice of the old European class system. The film brilliantly exposes the conflicting views of the progressive American Baroness, who married for love and her husband, the Baron, a reseller of Italian art and pornographer, who married for money.

Probably shot on digital video, this film weaves music into its plot perfectly. Maximizing the limited means of this film, set designers created a wonderful Parisian castle and creatively redecorated it as the Baroness did within the story. The work on the costumes was equally effective, especially as the American Quaker’s dresses were sober compared with the nobles’.