The legendary French director Jacques Rivette is almost eighty now, but age seems to be speeding up his internal clock; his newest film, The Duchess of Langeais is two hours and seventeen minutes long, which, coming from the man who made Out 1 (773 minutes in its "restored" version), La Belle noiseuse (236 minutes), L'Amour fou (252 minutes), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (193 minutes), is kind of like Martin Scorsese reading the Bible in ten minutes while on crack. Rivette's 2001 romantic comedy Va Savoir actually set off concerned muttering among long-time fans who were worried about him because he'd only managed to get 154 minutes of movie into theaters; everybody was greatly relieved when word got out that there was also a 220-minute director's cut that he'd love to show you. (The concept of the director's cut might have been invented with Rivette in mind; he recut the four-hour La Belle noiseuse into a two-hour-five-minute film that was released to theaters as Divertimento, though it was not explained why anyone would want a shorter version of a movie that largely consisted of Emmanuelle Béart standing around buck naked.) Speaking as someone who has sometimes emerged from a Rivette movie feeling as if both my ass and my eyeballs were in need of a vigorous massage and possibly a chemical skin peel, I've always admired his willingness to test the boundaries of an acceptable running time for narrative films. It was as if he were saying to the audience for art movies, "Hey, you care about cinema, huh? You believe in the personal expression of the filmmaker? You're here because you think you might get something different than what you get from mainstream movies, is that right? That's great. So sit down, shut up, and prepare to pay the babysitter overtime!" Except that it would sound a lot better if Rivette said that, since everything sounds better in French. Although The Duchess of Langeais is much shorter than the frisky Va Savoir, I doubt that it will strike anyone as ominously lightweight. The good news for veteran Rivette fans is that while it's only a little more than two and a quarter hours, it feels at least twice that long.
The movie is based on a Balzac novel whose original title, which is also the movie's title in France, is "Touch Not the Axe," words that might be Rivette's motto in the editing room. It is not so much a love story as an exploration of the deranging possibilities of thwarted expectations and unrequited desire. Set mostly in Paris in the 1820s, the movie stars Guillaume Depardieu as a general who has become a fashionable celebrity because of his adventures, and Jeanne Balibar as the Duchess, who invites him to visit her at home in the evenings. Talking to his imaginary friend while he stands outside the Duchess's home, the general boasts of his intention to "make her my mistress." But once he gets indoors, the Duchess, who has carefully laid herself out for his delectation, asks him to tell her stories of his heroism, then, having gotten him all worked up, sends him homr frustrated night after night. Finally he cracks and declares that he can't take it anymore and will never visit nor have anything to do with her again — which, naturally, causes her to snap and begin moaning about how she can't bear to be without him. At one point she scandalizes the neighborhood by sending her coach to stay outside the general's house all night and into the morning, so that people will at least think that she's his fallen woman. It's a little like Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that instead of using the rules of love and seduction to wage cold-blooded war on others, the characters are flaunting how desperately they're at the mercy of their passions. At the same time, nobody's actually getting any. Most of the movie is a flashback from a scene where the general finds the Duchess, who has disappeared from Paris and his life, holed up in a convent on a Spanish island, serving as a Carmelite nun. They converse for a while in French, while chaperoned by a nun who doesn't speak the language, who thinks that the general is the Duchess's brother — though from all the heavy panting that he does when in his "sister's" presence, she must think the poor guy is about to drop dead of asthma. Finally, the Duchess can't take it anymore and cries out, "Sister, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" When I saw the movie, that line brought down the house. A lot of people in the theater burst out laughing, though it isn't supposed to be funny, and I don't think it was mocking laughter, either. It was obvious that we were about to see what had gone on between these two now, and it felt like people were laughing at relief and eager anticipation that now we were getting to the good stuff. Little did we know...
Rivette has made a terrific show of being faithful to his source. Most of the movie consists of carefully composed scenes where the actors speak their dialogue, and much of what narrative information can't be conveyed through these means is simply given to us written out on title cards. The movie is...well, it's kind of boring, but in a kind of fascinating way. The actors are up there smoldering away in these tight, frozen frames, and the emotions are over the top yet seem to be contained under glass. Balibar's performance, which has to run the gamut from cruel, controlling minx to helpless victim of love, is phenomenal; Depardieu's isn't as sturdy, but he's still hard to take your eyes off, if only because he looks enough like his father that watching him is like seeing a vision of what Gerard Depardieu might have looked like in his late thirties if he'd had his stomach stapled. Still, there's a sequence towards the end when the general is on a ship with some mates of his who want to help him abduct his beloved from the nunnery. The men in his posse don't have much to do, but just from the way they pull together on their mission and they way they grin while drawing straws to see which of them has to dress up in a habit and go undercover, they seem like a fun bunch of guys, and it's amazing what a relief it is to spend some time with them after two hours trapped inside with two neurotic, self-denying romantic masochists. The Duchess of Langeais goes into U.S. theatrical release next week, but tonight it begins its run at Walter Reade Theater in New York as part of the "Film Comments Selects" series. Some of the people seeing it tonight sure did pick a hell of a date movie for Valentine's Day.
