Wexner Center for the Arts: Film/Video - The Duchess of Langeais

Contemporary Screen

Area and regional premieres, films fresh from the international film festival circuit, award-winners and recent audience favorites...You'll find films you won't see anywhere else in central Ohio on the Contemporary Screen schedule.

The Duchess of Langeais

(Jacques Rivette, 2007)

Fri, June 20 - Sat, June 21, 2008 | 7:00PM
Film/Video Theater

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"This is aesthetic bliss on a dizzyingly high level. A masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony."—Glenn Kenny, Premiere

Jacques Rivette, the most elusive of the French New Wave filmmakers, at 80 years of age is as nimble as ever with his third—and most faithful—adaptation of Balzac, The Duchess of Langeais. The exquisite Jeanne Balibar plays the title character who frequents the most extravagant balls in 1820s’ Paris and leads on a smitten Napoleonic general (Guillaume Depardieu) in a hot and cold game of dueling seductions. The film’s French title literally translates as “Don’t Touch the Axe” and that provocative phrase gives a sense of the film’s treatment of love in the alternating throes of repression and danger. (137 mins., 35mm)

Trailer: