''The Duchess of Langeais'' is a 2007 French-Italian period drama film directed by

Jacques Rivette Jacques Rivette (; 1 March 1928 – 29 January 2016) was a French film director and film critic most commonly associated with the French New Wave and the film magazine ''Cahiers du Cinéma''. He made twenty-nine films, including ''L'amour fou' ...

. Its original French title is ''Ne touchez pas la hache'' ("Don't touch the axe"). It is based on the 1834 novel of the same name by

Honoré de Balzac Honoré de Balzac ( , more commonly , ; born Honoré Balzac;Jean-Louis Dega, La vie prodigieuse de Bernard-François Balssa, père d'Honoré de Balzac : Aux sources historiques de La Comédie humaine, Rodez, Subervie, 1998, 665 p. 20 May 179 ...

. The film stars

Jeanne Balibar Jeanne Balibar (born 13 April 1968) is a French actress and singer. Life and career Balibar was born in Paris, the daughter of Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar and physicist Françoise Balibar. She started her career as a student in th ...

and

Guillaume Depardieu Guillaume Jean Maxime Antoine Depardieu (7 April 1971 – 13 October 2008) was a French actor, winner of a César Award, and the oldest child of Gérard Depardieu. Early life Depardieu was the son of actor Gérard Depardieu and his first wife, a ...

as lovers in the 1820s, who are involved in a tormented and frustrating relationship.

Plot

Armand de Montriveau, a general under Napoleon but of no account under the Restoration régime, has traced Antoinette de Langeais, the woman he loves, to a convent in Majorca where she has hidden herself as a nun. He asks for an interview, which is granted when Antoinette claims he is her brother. When they meet, she shrieks that he is her lover and he is hustled out. The scene shifts back to their first meeting at a party in Paris, where she is entranced by his tales of exploits in Egypt. She encourages him to visit the town house where she lives alone, her husband being elsewhere. She even receives him in her nightdress, claiming to be ill. For she is a born coquette, delighting in her power over Armand yet always denying any bodily intimacy. As well as reminding him she is married, she also plays the religion card by reminding him that adultery would be a sin. In time he starts playing her game in return, becoming capricious and moody. With masked friends, he even abducts her and threatens to torture her, but when she seems about to give in he lets her go. He stops answering her letters, and even stops opening them. In despair, she gives him an ultimatum: to meet her or never see her again. He does not keep the rendezvous and she disappears from Paris. The scene shifts forward to Armand and his friends who, after the rebuff in the convent, decide to storm the place in the middle of the night and abduct Antoinette. Reaching her room, they find her laid out dead.

Cast

Guillaume Depardieu Jeanne Balibar Berlinale 2007

as Antoinette de Langeais *

as Armand de Montriveau *

Michel Piccoli Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli (27 December 1925 – 12 May 2020) was a French actor, producer and film director with a career spanning 70 years. He was lauded as one of the greatest French character actors of his generation who played a wide vari ...

as Vidame de Pamiers *

Bulle Ogier Bulle Ogier (born Marie-France Thielland; 9 August 1939) is a French actress and screenwriter. She adopted the professional surname Ogier, which was her mother's maiden name. Her first appearance on screen was in ''Voilà l'Ordre'', a short film ...

as Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry * Anne Cantineau as Clara de Sérizy * Marc Barbé as Marquis de Ronquerolles * Thomas Durand as Henri de Marsay * Mathias Jung as Julien * Julie Judd as Lisette * Nicolas Bouchaud as Maxime de Trailles * Beppe Chierici as Alcalde * Victoria Zinny as Mother Superior * Barbet Schroeder as The Duke of Grandlieu

Reception

Review aggregation website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

reported an approval rating of 70%, based on 66 reviews, with an average score of 6.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "At times plodding and dialogue heavy, ''The Duchess of Langeais'' is nevertheless an intriguing and rewarding dissection of class and gender relations." At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 74, based on 23 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Accolades

References

External links

* 2007 films 2000s French-language films Films based on works by Honoré de Balzac Films directed by Jacques Rivette Films about Catholic nuns Films set in 1823 2000s historical drama films French historical drama films Italian historical drama films 2007 drama films 2000s French films {{2000s-France-film-stub