The Duchess of Langeais (2007)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Best movie of this year hands down!

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The novels of French writer Honore de Balzac concern themselves with the corrupting influence of society's illusions and express disdain for the shallow games people play. This theme is especially present in his short story "Don't Touch the Axe", later titled "La Duchesse de Langeais" after it was incorporated into his larger work known as "La Comedy Humaine". This story that casts aspersions on the artificiality of French high society in the early 1800s and the stilted rules that govern their affairs has now been brought to the screen by 80-year-old French auteur Jacques Rivette. Originally planned in 1948 as a collaboration of the talents of Greta Garbo and James Mason, directed by Max Ophuls, Rivette's thirty-first feature film, The Duchess of Langeais, is a period piece that faithfully follows Balzac's text yet contains touches of Rivette's wry humor in a way that Balzac probably did not envision.Slow paced and exquisitely detailed, the film opens in a convent on the Spanish isle of Majorca. Armand de Montriveau, a General and a war hero in Napolenon's army is played by Guilliame Depardieu, son of the great French actor Gerard Depardieu. Armand has found his lover, Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), after a five year search and is granted one interview with the now Carmelite nun. Interrupted by intertitles that indicate a character's internal state or the passage of time, the story flashes back five years to tell the tale of the thwarted lovers and their sexless passion. At a social event, Montriveau asks for an introduction to the stately Duchess of Langeais, a scion of a highly placed family, who he views across the next room. It is apparent from the outset that the two live in different worlds. The Duchess exists in a society of dances and balls where everything revolves around manners while Montriveau is a soldier who is awkward and unrefined.She is married but her husband is not seen, allowing Montriveau the opening to court her with stories of his desert escapades. His story becomes extended over several nights as the Duchess fakes illness and disinterest, and his telling of the story becomes only an excuse for their continued meetings. Balibar is mesmerizing as she draws her lover close then pushes him away until their romance becomes little more than a tug of war with intricate battle plans laid on both sides. Although Armand claims to be desperately in love, he is a passive suitor, devoted to satisfying her whims but not his desire. When he finally becomes the pursued rather than the pursuer, the table is set for emotional distress and increased psychological warfare. In the film's most dramatic moment, Montriveau stages a kidnapping that is intended to impress Antoinette with his intractable frustration but comes off merely as a means of convincing himself.Rivette is a careful observer as he watches the two warriors thrust and parry, offering a view of love as a tool of power. The tension is played out for such a long time that irritation and boredom eventually sets in but is held in check by the film's elegance and delicate physical beauty. With a feeling of unreality, the floorboards creak as the characters pass over them, lost in their own world, engaged in their rituals as if sleepwalking through a museum. Like a stately painting, The Duchess of Langeais is more to be admired than loved and I was rarely moved, yet days later I find that the film's strange, sad, haunting quality has returned over and over to memory like a sly obsession that has insinuated itself into my mind and refuses to let go.

I find it ironic that many reviewers walked out of this movie because, for me, the characters constantly walking on and off scene were what killed the movie for me. I dare someone to count the abrupt entrances/exits through darkened doorways. Ohhh, what do these darkened portals portend? NOTHING. They serve as clunky scene transitions AND the director felt these weren't clues enough because the story is also interrupted with narratives informing us that the next scene continues two weeks later, one month later, five years earlier, ad nauseum...A poor film must provide a written narrative to be understood; a good film will let the story speak for itself.

Jacques Rivette knows how make his feelings bare, then have them mysteriously vanish into dark corners. The same could be said about his characters. The disappearing act takes place when another actor takes over, but the actor who has gone, stays with you; doesn't move but lies in wait.A modern masterpiece from Rivette which gave me the excitement and awe I experienced when I first encountered Truffaut, Chaplin, Vigo, Renoir, and Becker. For others, it may be Rohmer, Godard, and Rossellini. It will be different for everyone else. I have seen almost all of Rivette's work up unto this point, so by saying this, I don't mean I am experiencing him for the first time. This film just displays that subtle love of film-making I experience when I first saw these filmmakers. The daring moods the film shifts between, carefully holding you tight through the games of passion being battled out between the two main characters.Its a shame people did not appreciate this; I'm very sorry you didn't. The entire time your minds raced around the desire to hate the pacing of this film, thus the film itself, a great thing of beauty passed by you. You may never see it. I even came across someone who said they had been annoyed by Depardieu's character's wooden leg and found it ridiculous. That is the character and that is also Depardieu. His father's greatness has certainly passed onto him.To loosely quote Henri Langois: "People are accustomed to crap when they have been fed crap their entire lives. Their throats become coated with it." To the people that have walked out of this film, or the others who have chosen to believe "they know the film's proper length" over the filmmaker's, I'm sorry. But it is an injustice on anyone's part to think they know more about the films of Rivette than Rivette himself.But to the people out there, the adventurous lovers of the cinema, DO NOT listen to the hostile words surrounding this film. It is splendid. It is another masterstroke in the career of a master like Rivette, and also a blow of justice to the wondrous pages of Balzac.

Jacques Rivette, the grand old late-bloomer of the French New Wave, is a sacred cow. You must either worship him or turn on him and shatter an idol. It's no use calling this new film "dull," though Armond White and Andrew Sarris have emphatically done so. That will make the cinephile fans call you stupid and impatient and without finesse or taste. It will only signal that you lacked patience. Had you endured the film's considerable longueurs with more fortitude, you would be proud and wear your multiple viewings as a banner of accomplishment, of authenticity.No, I would not want to fall into the obvious trap of calling this film "dull." But on the other hand, it's only jumping on a fashionable little bandwagon to call it a "masterpiece." It's more appropriate to describe it as a reexamination of history and culture--a film more to be studied than enjoyed. And for anybody, really, it does offer some pleasures. It's not hard to look at. Its authentic period interiors and rich costumes are beautiful and presented with an austerity than only enhances them. It has moments that bring Chereau's 'Gabrielle' to mind (though it's set later)--the recreation of a period that's so starkly emotional it almost becomes contemporary (because we subconsciously think of historical people, especially famous or rich ones, as lacking raw emotions). The crackly fires and creaky floors and flickering candles may seem clichés, but handled with a sure, unadorned European touch they seem fresh, like the Brechtian vérité of Versailles in Rossellini's stunning 1966 'La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV.'Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu, who play the sparring love-withholding lovers, the Duchesse Antoinette de Langeais and Colonel Armand Marquis de Montriveau, are not cool, and since they play with each other and never make love, it's all the more evident that neither of them has much presence on screen or chemistry with each other. Balibar is thin and long-necked enough to wear her Empire dresses well, but she's no beauty and has no spirit and alas, her voice is a bit whiny. Depardieu, the terribly overshadowed son of the famous father, as Armond White in an excellent if dismissive review writes is a "former dreamboat...hidden behind acne and unkempt facial hair." Supposedly playing the hero of a desert campaign, Depardieu actually limps from a car accident and despite a noble profile and good hair has a face that when seen dead-on seems to disintegrate as from depression or drug abuse or both. That may do for the shattered war hero look, but there isn't much about Guillaume that suggests officer material.These ill-fitted, unmagical actors are brought together to play two neurotic characters, who, in an unusually focused and formally scripted work for this director, seem like the characters in Catherine Breillat's 'The Last Mistress' (2007), trying to live the lives of eighteenth-century rakes but overcome by nineteenth-century romantic emotions, and in this case a kind of Victorian guilt alternative with the temptation to commit perversion. The colonel has the duchess kidnapped and threatens to brand her. Earlier she's said he's looking at her at a ball as if he had an ax in his hand; the French title is 'Ne touchez pas la hache,' "Don't touch the ax," referring to a superstition about the ax that killed Charles I of England.She welcomes being branded. So of course he has the hot iron taken away. Isn't this the essence of S&M--to provide the most exquisite torment by withholding torment? Armond White says "Rivette sticks to the melodrama of manners, as if observing a war of social proprieties. Each rendezvous--or missed meeting--of the would-be lovers becomes a game of one-upsmanship. These people are trapped in conventions that they adhere to more than anybody else. They're tragic 19th-century fools--figures from an unfamiliar age who test a modern audience's patience." They do that no doubt, but Rivette deliberately exaggerates the constricting conventions to go beyond naturalism or historical accuracy and make this almost a conceptual piece--and hence not really "Masterpiece Theater" at all (despite Nathan Lee) but something different and more intense and more like Gabrielle--but without Gabrielle's excitement.And without context. That excitement is partly achieved through great acting and much better casting (Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory, who have a kind of high-octane negative chemistry), but also through a vivid conveyed sense of a surrounding society that is shocked, even as it looks the other way. In The Duchess of Langeais we see only a few relatives, soldiers, and pals, mere appendages, so that despite all the adherence to constricting conventions, the protagonists seem isolated, and free, living in their own invented hell. That's much more a modern idea. Beware a historical film that feels authentic; it's probably even more anachronistic than a conventional one. Despite the duchess' constant attendance at balls, and a couple of dance scenes with nice music, there's not enough sense of a larger society with rules.Though there are plenty of cards and letters (most of the latter unopened however) and a few moments of voice-over, this is one of those times where a film from a book (or in this case a Balzac novella) needs more verbiage to make sense out of what's going on. You can't say nothing happens--besides the kidnapping there's an attempt to storm a convent. But the story is all about withholding--and we need to know its inner repercussions. Despite Rivette's self control and ability to tease, this is a literary adaptation that doesn't quite work cinematically. The duchess's withholding is due to the fact that, though she is enamored of Armond, or of his love for her, she considers it undignified of her to become his mistress. We need to be told more about the rule book she's following; you can't have a real sense of passion till you know the rules are that it makes people want to break.FSLC Film Comment Selects Feb. 2008; IFC release.