Duchess of Langeais

Adapted from a novella by Balzac, this new film by Jacques Rivette (of Celine and Julie Go Boating fame) has been playing around the city for a while, and even if you know little about it, you probably know that it is not your typical French trash that makes it over here. This is a real film. It never ever feels like its Hollywood version, the gaudy and over-populated "period piece" that Keira Knightley has made a career of. More surprisingly, the movie does not feel at all enchanted by Balzac's milieu, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and thankfully spares us the kind of immersion and knowingness we saw in Scorcese's Age of Innocence.

The film is very long. It moves slowly and follows a very Stendhalian logic of advance and retreat, from the first scene to the last. Balzac's easily-imitable style has the last word, of course, but the movie is primarily an exercise in frustration, interior scenes, and uncomfortable dialogue where the game is to say the unpleasant thing that has to be said, without being so clumsy that one can be held account for one's real motives (though they are known).

Jeanne Balibar is a strange beauty, and yet so French that I just had to take it on faith that "this must be what it's like over there," while Guillaume Depardieu is a lumbering, almost canine hunk--he could almost be in the Pirates of the Caribbean, except his sullen, sullen, sullen attitude is completely without charm. He is dull and very passionate all at once; it is a great performance.

I can't recommend this movie for entertainment. The audience I saw it with seemed to miss the point, and I got a bit anxious about whether it would ever end. But, if you like movies, this one is extremely well-made, somewhat memorable, and obviously the work of a master, though this is no masterpiece.