The Duchess of Langeais
The French title Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe) of this latest from veteran director Jacques Rivette echoes advice to the flirtatious heroine. The standard warning to Tower of London visitors refers equally to love taken too lightly. Audiences should brace themselves for a story which, for all its historical-pageant appeal, bears a sharp edge.
Guillaume Depardieu (son of Gerard and brother of Julie) plays the lovelorn Gen. Armand de Montriveau, hero of many a Napoleonic skirmish, returned to Parisian society like Capt. Wentworth to Jane Austen’s Bath. Recalling doomed romances from Romeo and Juliet to Les liaisons dangereuses, a gripping series of anticipations and reversals, manipulations and melodramatic gestures screws up the tension.
Having tracked his lost sweetheart to a Majorcan Convent where she remains behind bars, it’s not surprising Guillaume scowls for the first section of the film. After all, his has been a five-year search. Besides, he’s not welcome. As someone hisses from the pew behind him: “There are Frenchman everywhere it seems” – a resentful reference to Napoleon having claimed the Spanish throne. An injured foot makes him stomp about noisily, especially across polished wood floors, and his face is either screwed into a permanent frown or rigidly fixed in a Byronic sulk. There is no tenderness or irony in his prisoner-of-love role, features which made his father so appealing in his most recent film, The Singer. Guillaume may have won a Cesar for most promising actor in 1997 and played a number of roles since, but here his range is very narrow.
Jeanne Balibar as Antoinette, Duchess of Langeais may be past her prime, but is capable of suggesting the vivacity which once made her the toast of the Parisian salons and captured the heart of the absent Duke, her husband. The alternating bouts of self-possession and gaunt-eyed longings reveal a woman of rank trapped in an unforgiving social order. When she finds she can’t handle the anguish, it’s too late. Maturity adds to her pathos and if her scruples exasperate it is because the film requires a tremendous leap of empathy.
Five years before the convent visit the Admiral had decided to make Antoinette his mistress after some encouragement at one of the nightly dances she attends. It is difficult these days to sympathize with the religious and moral scruples cited by Antoinette, especially as Desdemona-like in the early stages of the courtship, she has invited Armand to visit her house so he can relate his adventures. The salon setting is, she claims, too distracting.
Adapted from a story by Balzac, author of Les miserables, the events are true to the text, the literary origins signaled by printed commentaries that punctuate the scenes. These have a distancing and at times satirical effect which lightens the tone. Here 1810 society has none of the frivolity and banter that characterized Laurent Tirard’s Molière but instead foregrounds propriety of manners and the stately quadrille. In this circle Antoinette’s friend is moved to admire a lady because “no-one can hold a snuff-box like her.”
Although Antoinette appears to think Armand will accept a platonic relationship, despite warnings that “He is akin to an eagle – you will not tame him” – he soon disabuses her by arranging a kidnapping, unexpected in what has otherwise been a to-ing and fro-ing that has gone on for weeks. He is a man accustomed to conquest; she is a product of a world where respectability rules. It’s a case of “steel against steel” and when he realizes she won’t be frightened he decides to desist. Expectations are once again deflated.
The director serves up plenty of visual distractions: a panoply of well-dressed cynics advise Antoinette in rooms aglow with gilded paneling and fin-de-siècle furniture, recalling films like Le ronde where gossip rules and satin waist-coats and powdered wigs mix with bosom-revealing empire gowns and beribboned ringlets. Fans and huge floral displays promote self-conscious posing. Contrasted with the elegance and violins of the spacious houses where Antoinette encounters the demi-monde, her private rooms are cozy with crackling log fires, candelabras and discreet servants. Here Antoinette sings a doleful song about flight from beloved shores, a melody which, overheard in the Majorcan convent, convinces Armand later that he has found his beloved.
The exterior scenes, too, are enchanting. Paris streets with horse-carriages in winter contrast with the brilliance of a Majorcan summer and the ancient stone walls of the convent, fortress-like above the cliffs and flanked by a flowery meadow. The cloisters and torchlight of Armand’s henchmen during their raid recall scenes from The Count of Monte Cristo. Reflecting the light-and-shade mood swings of the tortured lovers, the mise-en-scène provides a visual treat in an otherwise dark and claustrophobic tale of infinitely deferred consummation. You have been forewarned.
© 2007 Sheila Cornelius. All rights reserved.
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