GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/20/08)

The first masterpiece of 2008 — at least by American release date standards — the latest film from master French director Jacques Rivette is a masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony, an assured tragicomedy of manners and more. When concocting this project, Rivette knew only that he wanted to make a film with the lovely, beguiling actress Balibar and the forbidding, lugubrious Depardieu (Guillaume is the son of Gerard). He wrote a treatment for a contemporary thriller for the duo, but couldn't get it financed. So he turned to Balzac, who had provided him with inspiration before — Rivette's 1971 epic (over 12-hour) Out :1 is partially centered around a group of thirteen conspirators originally conceived by the 19th-century novelist — and found this tale of mad, unconsummated amour (a work that, incidentally, actually features the aforementioned thirteen conspirators, or at least a portion thereof). This is a costume piece, but it has an extremely contemporary sensibility — intellectually contemporary, that is, not pop. Although its meticulousness in terms of period detail is exemplary, the ironic gaze behind the storytelling — communicated for the most part via intertitles — is indeed a trenchant one.

The Duchess of Langeais (the title has been unfortunately changed from its original, Ne touchez pas la hache, that is, "Don't touch the axe," a metaphorical warning uttered at a crucial point in the film) begins on a Spanish island that's been taken by the forces of French General Montriveau (a haggard and haunted Depardieu). Montriveau has a particular interest in the island's convent, dedicated to St. Teresa of Avila; he requests an audience with a particular nun. After some difficulty, he gets it, but the Mother Superior shuts the curtain on their interview when the sister reveals that Montriveau was her lover. Cut to five years before, and another, more ornate curtain opens, revealing the glittering but regimented world of the Duchess of Langeais (Jeanne Balibar). After an introduction to a no less haggard-and-haunted looking Montriveau, the two begin a bizarrely convoluted parry-and-thrust courtship ("steel against steel," Montriveau observes at one point) that's as fascinating as it is frustrating. The Duchess is entirely at home with the code-heavy frivolity of her world, while Montriveau's determined gravitas aspires to metaphysical proportions. As the Duchess tests Montriveau's patience and Montriveau tests the Duchess' will, events turn alarming.

Rivette's camera is as sure and engrossing as it's ever been. "There isn't a wasted frame," New York's critic David Edelstein has observed, and he's correct — but that's hardly news to those who've been following Rivette's work over the past few decades. Even at his most putatively excessive — what with the 12-and-4-hour-films and such — Rivette's command of camera and cutting is astonishing, achieving effects that are rare in any kind of film. In his 1998 thriller Secret Defense, for instance, there's a near-twenty-minute, largely dialogue-free sequence on a train; Sandrine Bonnaire's character is mulling over whether to kill a man, and the camera moves and cutting rhythm of the scenes, combined of course with great acting, actually seem to convey the character's racing thoughts. There's nothing quite as bravura as that sequence here, but both Depardieu and Balibar give deeply palpable performances. The rhythms are slow, yes, but they have an undeniable, almost perverse pull. This is aesthetic bliss on a dizzyingly high level.

— Glenn Kenny