THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS World Cinema

The most active of the surviving Nouvelle Vague/Cahiers du Cinema players, 80-year-old writer-director Jacques Rivette has built a five-decades-long career centered on one preoccupation: the difficulty of cinematic representation. Rivette often uses the codes of theater as an exaggerated means of redefining film space and employ s a variety of acting styles to reveal the fragility of identity.

In this romantic melodrama, the Duchess of Langeais (the superb Jeanne Balibar) is a married coquette who frequents the most extravagant balls in Paris during the Restoration, where hypocrisy and vanity reign . The handsome General Armand de Montriveau (the excellent Guillaume Depardieu), upon first meeting the alluring Duchess, is smitten. She orchestrates a calculated game of seduction, including repeated refusals, but when the humiliated general eventually seeks his revenge, her love awakens.

Though rigorously Faithful to the 19th-century Balzac novel History of the Thirteen (screenwriters Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent also adapted LA BELLEN OISEUSE), DUCHESS is a distinctly Rivettian construct. A violent game of Flirtation, delay and frustration becomes a labyrinthine allegory on acting, with the ballrooms and salons of the Post-Napoleonic aristocracy redefined by their resemblance to theatrical space. By the end, . Rivette has led us, once again, to reconsider the essence of human identity.