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Reviews Counted:61
Fresh:41
Rotten:20
Average Rating:6.4/10
Consensus: At times plodding and dialogue heavy, The Duchess of Langeais is nevertheless an intriguing and rewarding dissection of class and gender relations.
Runtime: 2 hrs 17 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Synopsis: Jacques Rivette (VA SAVOIR) directs this masterful adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's novel about a game of hearts between General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a protégé of Bonaparte... [More]
Starring: Jeanne Balibar, Guillaume Depardieu, Bulle Ogier, Michel Piccoli
Director: Jacques Rivette
If you like multi-arced episodes of Masterpiece (formerly Masterpiece Theatre), the pacing might work in this padded film. As it was, experiencing this in real time was akin to watching two snails race on a muddy track.
A remote and chilly exercise, more museum piece than movie.
Classy? Yes,
Even though it's nearly 2 1/2 hours, unfolds in flashback and derives from Balzac, then, The Duchess of Langeais is among Rivette's more succinct and approachable works.
The Duchess of Langeais is a stately costume drama of wrenching passions expressed in courtly phrases.
Jacques Rivette’s Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art -- beautiful, true, profound.
Top CriticIt is the ultimate in movie as pane of glass, completely un-self-conscious of its own movieness but simply an intensely focused examination of human behavior on a narrative armature.
Based on a Balzac story, Rivette's Duchess manages to be both old-fashioned in its settings and circumstances, and coolly modern in its view of thwarted passion and despair.
The movie's satisfactions are subtle, but they run deep, and there are many.
Both Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu are quite compelling in their roles, and after about an hour, you fall into this film as completely as you'd fall into a book.
The Duchess of Langeais benefits from many New Wave innovations -- long, fluid takes and loosely organized improvisational scenes. Still, it feels like a curiously static entertainment.
The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.
Without Rivette's usual daring or playfulness, but still a highly accomplished entry in the lazy, stagnant "costume movie" genre.
A study in 19th-century European extremes, The Duchess of Langeais may put you off at first, but its playful tone could just as easily leave you pleasantly exhausted.
In Jacques Rivette’s remarkable The Duchess of Langeais, romantic devotion becomes a perverse kind of warfare, in which a lover who admits that he’s in love loses the campaign.
Rivette tells the story at a length any other filmmaker would have halved.
After more than 50 years of idiosyncratic filmmaking, Rivette, who turns 80 on Saturday, is as intense and rigorous an artist as ever.
Top CriticIn principle, anyone who loves his open-ended sense of film performance as adventure...ought to thrill to Rivette's latest film. So why did I spend most of The Duchess of Langeais...fighting to stay awake?
A scarred war hero and a delicately placed courtesan spar amongst the moldering walls of Restoration Paris. A graceful story of love's struggles amidst a brutal social climate of denial and despair.
One of Rivette's most accessible films.
February 21, 2008:
Critics Consensus: Cruel to Be Kind, Vantage Has Little Point, Guess Witless Protection's Tomatometer!
This week at the movies, we've got views to a kill, medicated youth, a pair of DIY filmmakers, and Southern justice. What do the critics have to say? More...
December 14, 2007:
Trailer & Poster review 
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