The Duchess of Langeais

“The Duchess of Langeais”, Jacques Rivette’s new film, opens with images leading the viewer across an ancient church floor patterned with symbols redolent of mysterious power, patched and faded beyond legibility if not resonance. A filigreed iron grille of prison-like bars separates absolutely the luminous space of an elaborately carved high altar, glistening with gilding and color and embellished with narrative images that we cannot see, from the darkened nave where seated congregants dutifully listen to a vocal concert Mass by the convent nuns, now used to celebrate the latest regime change: post-Napoleonic royal restoration. The church and convent is the crowning and orienting complex on an isolated rock of island jutting up into the sky from the pure blue line of the sea.

The film demarcates spheres of possibility and action and requires that the viewer abandon a premise normally taken as axiomatic: that the storyline will unfold in a fashion where the narrative elements build so as to reveal an underlying depth dimension.

Whatever vertical dimension exists in this work lives outside the story proper. It is referred to in the tale told by Armand, a French general; equally it shows up in the imagery of the up and above convent to which Antoinette, the duchess, repairs after her unconsummated affair seems to render daily life in society intolerable to her. Each of the two main characters encounters a life moment which offers the potential for a transformative experience. Neither, however, is prepared to receive an unanticipated shift in understanding, so that no defining moment can occur.

Antoinette and Armand meet at one of the elegant nightly soirees that constitute the socially acceptable round of amusements for upper class Parisians. She is intrigued by the damaged and illustrious soldier; he determines to make the beautiful duchess his mistress; more deeply each intuits in the other a trustworthy reflection of a substanceless stance.

Armand in successive segments tells the duchess of his time on campaign in the desert of Africa when he had to march barefoot under a punishing sun over a brutal terrain that never seemed to get closer to its goal. The native guide had lied about the distance, for there was no way back. Armand’s bitter denunciation produces no response from the guide except an indifferently offered dagger with which he may end his suffering, if he so chooses. Marching on, pushing himself beyond his physical limits and carried for the final distance on the native’s shoulders, he ultimately reaches that place which offers him a clear vision of the equal presence of opposites: desert on one side, oasis on the other. Life, he is invited to see, challenges him to choose a direction that calls to him.

To Armand, however, the experience he describes has no impact. The journey, far from being an entry into awareness, becomes reduced to a harried remembrance of when physical survival hung in the balance. The ordeal opens no new understanding because Armand does not have the capacity to encounter himself in a new form. Rather, he continues on the same road he will follow when he begins to woo the duchess- a determination to successfully complete a quest with which he is not actually engaged.

Suitably married to a husband of the right rank, Antoinette is only required to fulfill her mundane social duties. She is more than welcome to a love affair if she so desires, provided discretion is exercised as to the where and when. It would seem from very early in the film that we are witnessing the unfolding and inevitable consummation of a passionate liaison.

Something, alas, is missing. The lover, though often ardent in his words of pursuit, is barely lukewarm in his actions. Similarly, the woman for whom he is supposedly pining away speaks as though her whole life between their meetings is just dead routine. Antoinette is a flurry of energetic anticipation in preparing for Armand’s visits, yet, as soon as they are together, she is as distant in the present as ambiguous about a future between them.

The duchess takes the poses of a woman falling in love, even as we witness her infatuation with the style, not with the man. Armand brusquely makes a demand he cannot effect and Antoinette trumps his bluff by simply asking “how?” He arranges for the duchess’ abduction, but in parallel fashion loses the spark once it could catch flame. Armand has all the trappings of a man of action, but we recognize them as circumstantial, not characterological.

Once it is unmistakable that the two will never become lovers, Rivette teases us with the cleverness of the unraveling. They who cannot but be appearances to each other must remain hot in pursuit of what neither would know how to want. How can the frustration of this failed attraction be rendered meaningful?

Miraculously, the film provides an unexpected, though forceful, answer. The surrounding characters function as mouthpieces of the idea that adherence to social form and subordination of any feeling to the necessity of weighing how it is to function in the world is precisely what gives life meaning. Forget transformative experiences, grand passions, religious conversions, liftings of the veil- no one wants them. If some misfit is seduced by a moment of inner revelation into imagining a different life, it is everyone’s task, by way of censure or complicity, to unite towards supporting that person in keeping the personal private until it can be conveniently forgotten.

Each of these characters is in harmony with his/her station in life; they are survivors. The aging and practical Princess, like the convent’s Mother Superior later, understands that form is the only unconditional reality of any given collective; the worldly and veteran Monsieur de Pamier understands that life can only be lived at the juncture of appearance and sentiment. The duchess’ maid, Lisette, can easily resist the luxurious cream-filled pastries that do not agree with her and Julien, the Majordomo, knows that his lot is to obey command and bell alike. Like the Princess and Pamier, these two know how to negotiate advantage from the small, yet immensely variable, slice of latitude that social form and the necessities of life allow.

Antoinette and Armand have found in each other the needed foil for their own reflections. Seemingly the misfits, they are, in fact, utterly conventional. Their security lies in being told that there can be no life outside the rules. Neither wants the substance of contact, for each knows of his/her incapacity to fully surrender to experience. Their gamesmanship ratchets up into high gear until the duchess ruins herself socially, eventually finding her way to the inspired depravations of the religious refuge.

Armand plans to abduct the duchess a second time. With his band of accomplices, the weary and sickly general breaks in to the convent, too late: the duchess is dead. Again, he can think of nothing better than to follow through on his original plan and steals Antoinette’s lifeless body, carrying the corpse back to his waiting ship. Armand is now as adrift as the directionless vessel that suddenly no longer has purpose. His cohort suggests tying weights to the meaningless body and dumping it into the sea, henceforth thinking of the entire experience like a childhood story, or a poem.