‘If you can’t love me, at least love my moustache’ — Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu in The Duchess of Langeais

The Duchess of Langeais

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The Duchess of Langeais completely lacks in craftsmanship, verve, style and emotional impact. Efforts to maintain interest into the film’s second hour are as ineffectual as the male lead — Armand, Marquis de Whatever — in his pursuit of Antoinette, Duchess of Langeais, who puts up le resistance as soon as he gets a peek at her ankle bone and makes his move. His love goes physically unrequited even as the Duchess professes the feeling to be mutual, all through insipid jawing that conforms to the worst caricatures of period-piece dialogue. Antoinette’s motives for prudence seem to be aristocratic and religious repression, as evinced by her eventual retreat to a Spanish convent, but these two elements are not given enough representation onscreen to justify all of the chatter.

Director Jacques Rivette seems to have forgotten that movies are made up of both characters and scenes, and The Duchess of Langeais needs more characters of consequence, fewer repetitive scenes and more cohesive dialogue. The meandering plot and utterly uninspired direction might have been tolerable had the two leads possessed some chemistry. Alas, Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu are a pair of dour, sullen thespians inexplicably chosen to headline a movie that is supposed to centre on an all-consuming love. Their efforts to portray impetuous, unforgiving passion fall brutally short. In spite of its other crucial and massive failings, the inability to cast appropriate leads is this film’s Waterloo.

Another major problem is the lack of production value. Much of the film is cloistered inside single rooms within 19th-century manors that may very well be little-used historical centres in and around Paris — it looks as though just beyond the camera frame lies a wall of trivia pamphlets or a gift shop with mini-guillotines for cutting the caps off cigars. Background artists seem to be in short supply as well, which, along with the glacial pacing and gloomy lighting, makes the film feel even emptier. Time and again, a bowing servant announces Armand’s arrival for the latest in a litany of soulless exchanges with his so-called lover, who looks bored and is unconvincing as an unattainable duchess. What should have been an impassioned love story is instead a chilly, lifeless waste.