The Duchess of Langeais
Written by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and Jacques Rivette
Directed by Jacques Rivette
IFC First Take
2008
Rating:


Jacques Rivette, like many of his French New Wave compatriots, has a true talent for finding the raw power within literary works that in more reserved hands (such as most of the Merchant-Ivory productions) would be pulse-less. Returning to the stories of Honorι de Balzac for the third time after the monumental "Out 1" and "La Belle Noiseuse," racing pulses aren't a problem for Rivette in "The Duchess of Langeais" despite its plot of an unconsummated affair.

"The Duchess" begins with French General Marquis Armand Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) visiting a Barefoot Carmelite cloister in hopes of speaking to his former lover, Duchess Antoinette Langleais (Jeanne Baliber of Rivette's "Va Savoir"), now a nun. The meeting is abruptly ended by the mother superior closing a curtain on Montriveau. Another curtain opens on a ball five years earlier when Armand and Antoinette first meet. The Duchess is warned the "leonine" General is "dull and somber," but she insists on being introduced to him. Montriveau for his part declares of the married Duchess, "I shall make her my mistress!"

The love affair between the Duchess and the General is a passionate battle of wills, pitting "steel against steel." Antoinette seems to be playing games with Armand, constantly interrupting his stories of war under Napoleon and refusing more physical advances. Armand finds this increasingly infuriating and even threatens violence (the French title "Touch Not the Ax" refers to a menacing anecdote Armand tells). But, unbeknownst to both of them until it's too late, Antoinette has pledged to Armand something more than her body – her heart.

Rivette is sometimes the most experimental of the New Wave auteurs – not even Jean-Luc Godard has attempted a 12-hour opus like Rivette's controversial "Out 1" – and he's also one of the movements greatest minimalists. His direction and camerawork with cinematographer William Lubtchansky ("Regular Lovers," "Va Savoir") is stately and tense, so that when Antoinette warns, "Armand, you are flying into a passion," the peril of romantic obsession is intensely felt. Rivette offers some of the patented irony and detachment effects of the New Wave in the form of biting intertitles, but more often he allows the barely repressed emotion to bleed through, allowing Antoinette and Armand's tκte-ΰ-tκte to feel like a real battle for the human heart.

Posted Sunday, February 24, 2008

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/the.duchess.of.langeais