The Duchess of Langeais
Directed by Jacques Rivette at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & the IFC Center
There’s so much French New Wave nimbleness, generosity and beauty in André Téchiné’s The Witnesses that The Duchess of Langeais by Jacques Rivette, one of the original New Wave directors, feels drab and out of date. But that’s just Rivette’s style. He still has the New Wave’s revisionist spirit—turning a Balzac short story into an extended period piece. But it's inflected with his own peculiar sense of theatrical tension and narrative whimsy: a stage play shot as a nature study. If Téchiné hadn’t updated New Wave conventions so recently, Rivette’s lack of effervescence might seem less oddball.
Rivette submerges the Renoir lessons that were the New Wave’s guiding principle; an understanding of human eccentricity merely informs his approach to the Balzacian battle of nerves that takes place between Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), a flirtatious duchess who risks an affair with an equally petulant Napoleonic colonel, Armand (Guillaume Depardieu). Both characters use their animal attraction to flout the social rules that govern their positions. Antoinette and Armand duel with their hormones—each firing up the other and then being torturously withdrawn, difficult and confoundingly principled. It’s a sexual/ethical chess game.
If one of the more popular New Wave directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer—even Nouvelle Vague student Téchiné) had directed The Duchess of Langeais, it might have emphasized Antoinette and Armand’s sensual feints. But 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.
The exasperation of watching The Duchess of Langeais comes from Rivette’s singular interest in secretive social behavior.
Antoinette and Armand are actually at war with legal and religious proprieties that restrict their emotions, yet they take it out on those closest to them—perversely tormenting their objects of desire. It’s what Mme. DeStael (whom Antoinette reads) famously called “A new kind of combat, in which men follow the laws of neither kindness nor honor.” Rivette’s profundity only comes across if you realize the truth of his perspective; the problem with The Duchess of Langeais is that the perspective itself is so unprepossessing.
That brings us to the most perplexing aspect of Rivette’s filmmaking: his sometimes desiccating use of actors. It still hurts to remember Rivette’s coarse presentation of the usually graceful Anna Karina in Haut Bas Fragile—he went beyond realistic to being downright unflattering. That’s where Jeanne Balibar begins. Balibar has been Rivette’s ingenue of choice since starring in Va Savoir (2000), and she is terribly unappealing here. She plays the persnickety Duchess as a sexually voracious wench: skinny, calculating, with an always distrustful, scrutinizing expression on her face. Yes, there are people like this in the world, but they’re seldom the focus of a feature-length film. It’s puzzling that Rivette didn't simply make a biopic of the wise but romantically unstable Mme. DeStael.
When Antoinette’s aunt (a dowager Bulle Ogier) advises her “Don’t be a coquette,” it’s laughable. Balibar is the essence of what the French call jolie laide—homely with a lopsided walk like Nora Gregor’s in Rules of the Game. But in contrast to the great Arletty (Children of Paradise, Daybreak) who emanated plain yet regal femininity, Balibar resembles a shrill, pouty Paris Hilton type (modeling the most sumptuous costumes since Love in the Time of Cholera). One longs for Rivette’s previous Balzac adaptation, La Belle Noiseuse, which starred The Witnesses’ Emmanuelle Beart as a painter’s model who made eroticism an ethical issue.
Depardieu, a former dreamboat, plays Armand’s emotional wreckage, hidden behind acne and unkempt facial hair. Antoinette refuses Armand’s advances by saying, “I don’t see you with the eyes of the body.” She eventually retreats from passion to join a convent. But Duchess is so ascetically grim that it never achieves Antoinette’s purely spiritual viewpoint. Rivette evokes the tragic, mistimed love stories of Visconti’s Senso, Ophuls’ Madame De, even Patrice Chereu’s Gabrielle; but their aesthetic excitement far exceeded his dull, greenish-blue verismo. Balzac’s study of Antoinette and Armand’s psychology is ironic, yet Rivette doesn’t animate the tragic result. As a result, Duchess of Langeais—compared to an exhilarating neo-New Wave movie like The Witnesses—is always dull.
Directed by Jacques Rivette at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & the IFC Center
There’s so much French New Wave nimbleness, generosity and beauty in André Téchiné’s The Witnesses that The Duchess of Langeais by Jacques Rivette, one of the original New Wave directors, feels drab and out of date. But that’s just Rivette’s style. He still has the New Wave’s revisionist spirit—turning a Balzac short story into an extended period piece. But it's inflected with his own peculiar sense of theatrical tension and narrative whimsy: a stage play shot as a nature study. If Téchiné hadn’t updated New Wave conventions so recently, Rivette’s lack of effervescence might seem less oddball.
Rivette submerges the Renoir lessons that were the New Wave’s guiding principle; an understanding of human eccentricity merely informs his approach to the Balzacian battle of nerves that takes place between Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), a flirtatious duchess who risks an affair with an equally petulant Napoleonic colonel, Armand (Guillaume Depardieu). Both characters use their animal attraction to flout the social rules that govern their positions. Antoinette and Armand duel with their hormones—each firing up the other and then being torturously withdrawn, difficult and confoundingly principled. It’s a sexual/ethical chess game.
If one of the more popular New Wave directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer—even Nouvelle Vague student Téchiné) had directed The Duchess of Langeais, it might have emphasized Antoinette and Armand’s sensual feints. But 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.
The exasperation of watching The Duchess of Langeais comes from Rivette’s singular interest in secretive social behavior.
Antoinette and Armand are actually at war with legal and religious proprieties that restrict their emotions, yet they take it out on those closest to them—perversely tormenting their objects of desire. It’s what Mme. DeStael (whom Antoinette reads) famously called “A new kind of combat, in which men follow the laws of neither kindness nor honor.” Rivette’s profundity only comes across if you realize the truth of his perspective; the problem with The Duchess of Langeais is that the perspective itself is so unprepossessing.
That brings us to the most perplexing aspect of Rivette’s filmmaking: his sometimes desiccating use of actors. It still hurts to remember Rivette’s coarse presentation of the usually graceful Anna Karina in Haut Bas Fragile—he went beyond realistic to being downright unflattering. That’s where Jeanne Balibar begins. Balibar has been Rivette’s ingenue of choice since starring in Va Savoir (2000), and she is terribly unappealing here. She plays the persnickety Duchess as a sexually voracious wench: skinny, calculating, with an always distrustful, scrutinizing expression on her face. Yes, there are people like this in the world, but they’re seldom the focus of a feature-length film. It’s puzzling that Rivette didn't simply make a biopic of the wise but romantically unstable Mme. DeStael.
When Antoinette’s aunt (a dowager Bulle Ogier) advises her “Don’t be a coquette,” it’s laughable. Balibar is the essence of what the French call jolie laide—homely with a lopsided walk like Nora Gregor’s in Rules of the Game. But in contrast to the great Arletty (Children of Paradise, Daybreak) who emanated plain yet regal femininity, Balibar resembles a shrill, pouty Paris Hilton type (modeling the most sumptuous costumes since Love in the Time of Cholera). One longs for Rivette’s previous Balzac adaptation, La Belle Noiseuse, which starred The Witnesses’ Emmanuelle Beart as a painter’s model who made eroticism an ethical issue.
Depardieu, a former dreamboat, plays Armand’s emotional wreckage, hidden behind acne and unkempt facial hair. Antoinette refuses Armand’s advances by saying, “I don’t see you with the eyes of the body.” She eventually retreats from passion to join a convent. But Duchess is so ascetically grim that it never achieves Antoinette’s purely spiritual viewpoint. Rivette evokes the tragic, mistimed love stories of Visconti’s Senso, Ophuls’ Madame De, even Patrice Chereu’s Gabrielle; but their aesthetic excitement far exceeded his dull, greenish-blue verismo. Balzac’s study of Antoinette and Armand’s psychology is ironic, yet Rivette doesn’t animate the tragic result. As a result, Duchess of Langeais—compared to an exhilarating neo-New Wave movie like The Witnesses—is always dull.
