Courting Danger

Aristocrats play complicated mating games in The Duchess of Langeais.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

QUITE THE CATCH: Jeanne Balibar flutters and squirms like a bird in the hands of Guillaume Depardieu. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Jacques Rivette's fondness for game-playing makes him ideally suited for the knives-out romance of aristocratic society. Set during the Bourbon Restoration, when royalists were luxuriating in post-Napoleonic splendor, The Duchess of Langeais posits a not-quite-love affair between the Marquis de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a veteran of the Napoleon's African campaign, and Jeanne Balibar's angular noblewoman. Or at least, it does after a while. Rivette begins at the end, five years after the fact, with Montriveau still licking his wounds and the duchess sequestered in a Majorcan convent.

Rivette has never troubled himself unduly with plot. His epic, 12-hour Out 1 seems to be quite literally made up as it goes along, as if his actors were inventing a story just to give themselves something to do. When the duchess gets her first whiff of Montriveau, she flirts with him by requesting a tale of his wartime adventures, but circumstances repeatedly conspire to thwart him. It takes several encounters for him to relate his story, and then, just as he reaches the climactic line, she abruptly changes the subject.

What intrigues Rivette is the machinery of their courtship, a dangerous double game of plots and counterplots in which nothing so simple as love mutually given and received can long endure. The duchess boldly petitions Montriveau to stop by her apartments, and receives him in a nightgown with a look of unbridled lust in her eyes. But when he reciprocates what he takes to be her feelings, she dances away, her feelings stirred only when Montriveau's sentiments have turned to a thin, bitter hate.

Balibar is an inspired choice for the role, simply because she seems so wrong for it. Her angular, asymmetrical face seems as out of place among the gilded furnishings as a Picasso in Versailles, her darting, unpredictable movements alien to the regimented life around her. Her presence itself is a deliberate affront to the suspension of disbelief, compounded in a moment when she turns and speaks to the camera. There is, at least at first, no sincerity in her. When Montriveau corners her and tells her to look in his eyes and profess her love or lack thereof, she squirms and flutters like a bird caught in his grip.

Montriveau, by contrast, is entirely too serious and humorless, seething with resentments but unable to escape the duchess' allure. Depardieu lost his leg in a motorcycle accident several years ago, and so Montriveau walks with a pronounced limp, the outward sign of his inner wounds.

With Rivette regular William Lubtchansky at the controls, the camera engages the characters as if it were their partner in a complicated dance. (Not for nothing does one tense exchange between the lovers conclude with a quadrille.) The camera's movements are not purposeful or foreordained, but insistently playful, engaging the characters' actions rather than dictating them. In this world, there is no solid footing, no firm ground on which to stand. The terrain is always shifting.

The Duchess of Langeais is, at two and a quarter hours, among the shortest of Rivette's features, but it drags in spots, particularly in its later stretches, when it begins to feel positively distended. In Rivette's best movies, the characters are literally the authors of their own fate, but here they sometimes feel adrift, as if they're just kicking around waiting for something to happen.

Rivette counts on the hint of submerged menace to animate the movie's more languorous patches, when the ambient crackle of well-stoked fire is the liveliest thing onscreen. The movie's original title, taken from the Balzac source novella, is Don't Touch the Axe, coming from a none too thinly veiled threat Montriveau launches in the duchess' direction. The ax in question is the one that beheaded Charles I, a reminder that the duchess' lightly worn privilege is vulnerable to his rather more direct approach. In the battle between royalists and militarists, Rivette takes no side, content to watch the two spar with each other and wear themselves out. There will be new games to play.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Duchess of Langeais

Directed by Jacques Rivette

An IFC Films release