The Duchess of Langeais.

"Jacques Rivette returns to the rigorous formalism and claustrophobic interiors of La Religeuse [The Nun] to create a refined, bituminous, and cooly smoldering tale of seduction, obsession, and manners in The Duchess of Langeais," writes acquarello.

"Like Truffaut's The Story of Adele H, Rohmer's The Marquise of O, and Rivette's own The Nun, this Balzac adaptation is a costume drama that bristles with measured passion," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Masterfully wrought and superbly acted (especially by [Jeanine] Balibar, who excels at Antoinette's increasing hunger for emotional violence), the film is a piercing pas de deux that excoriates romance even as its doomed characters are consumed by it."

Updated through 2/22.

"Rivette has pared the story down so that there isn't a wasted frame," writes David Edelstein in New York. He "has aged into one of cinema's most ingenious minimalists."

"[W]hile it's often hard to stomach the whiplash-inducing pace Rivette sets for the story, it's part of the sly, self-mocking nature of the narrative to mix tragic romance with barbed humor," writes Simon Abrams at Twitch.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto - and Steve Dollar (New York Sun), Bryant Frazer, Phil Nugent (ScreenGrab), Andrew Sarris (New York Observer), Nick Schager and Benjamin Strong (L Magazine).

Updates, 2/20: Nathan Lee in the Voice: "'A vast melodic phrase,' Rivette once wrote, 'a continuous arabesque, a single implacable line which leads people ineluctably towards the as yet unknown, embracing in its trajectory a palpitant and definitive universe.' He was writing about Roberto Rossellini, but the words serve as well as any to describe the elusive enchantment of his own mise-en-scène."

"For much of the film, I was impressed by Rivette's ability to present characters who were both boldly up-front about their passions and desires, and yet too distant to be empathized with," writes Zachary Wigon in the Tisch Film Review. "However, by the film's end this admiration turned to puzzlement."

Updates, 2/21: "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," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The rhythms are slow, yes, but they have an undeniable, almost perverse pull. This is aesthetic bliss on a dizzyingly high level."

"If one of the more popular New Wave directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer - even Nouvelle Vague student [André] Téchiné) had directed The Duchess of Langeais, it might have emphasized Antoinette and Armand's sensual feints," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "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."

"Is it wrong to be more entranced by the floors the actors are dancing over than the dance?" asks the Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "Duchess isn't all bad, but it runs too short on surprises - once the premise is laid out, there's little to do but wait for the worst."

"A once damningly oddball second-tier New Waver, Rivette's continued vitality and lissome touch has made him ripe for rediscovery," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "And no director has depended more heavily upon his women; the genius attributed to him is really his chemistry with Juliet Berto, Emmanuelle Beart in her more malleable years, or Bulle Ogier (who appears in Duchess, along with Michel Piccoli, for old time's sake) - what they pull out of him, and he them. Balibar, whose tremulant, doe-like loveliness has never been so well admired, is one of his best, fluttering with concentrated life every moment she's on-screen."

Updates, 2/22: "Jacques Rivette's Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art - beautiful, true, profound," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Much is often made of [Rivette's] abiding interest in the theatrical - certainly in evidence here - but this doesn't preclude an interest in life. It deepens it."

"The picture is stiff and awkward in places - even Rivette's signature meditative camerawork feels more static, less fluid, than usual," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But the picture has an unsettling, haunting quality that I haven't been able to shake."

"In an intellectual sense, The Duchess of Langeais comes to a devastating place, but the emotion is a little absent," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Like Rivette's camera moves, Duchess is restrained and tasteful. As [Guillaume] Depardieu tells one of his comrades about his fitful love affair, it's 'not a book, but a poem.'"

"Rivette eschews the Brechtian, modernist touches a director like Manoel de Oliveira might have brought to Balzac," notes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Even his French New Wave compatriot Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astree and Celadon goes further in updating its source material by including deliberate anachronisms and a hip sexual fluidity.... By offering such a faithful interpretation of an old-fashioned vision of love, The Duchess of Langeais challenges us to ponder whether our own relationships might not be equally tortured."

For Mike D'Angelo, writing at ScreenGrab, this is one " superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills.... Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.)"

Posted by dwhudson at February 19, 2008 1:55 AM