La Duchesse de Langeais (1942)
Directed by Jacques de Baroncelli

Film Review

Honoré de Balzac's 1834 novella La Duchesse de Langeais has been adapted many times for cinema - most recently by Jacques Rivette as Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) - but to date no film adaptation compares with Jacques de Baroncelli's inspired 1942 production.  A lavish piece, this improves greatly on the original work, a literary potpourri that is far from being Balzac's most coherent exploration of the human psyche.  Impressing with a stunning visual composition that brings an exquisite poignancy, the film also boasts one of the greatest screen performances of the decade - Edwige Feuillère at her most dazzling in the title role.

Whilst many of his films were successes when they first came out, much of Baroncelli's work is now considered inferior crowdpleaser fare and consequently the director is pretty well overlooked in all but the most comprehesive guides to French cinema.  Period dramas based on literary works were a particular forte of Baroncelli - others include Le Père Goriot (1921), Michel Strogoff (1936), Les Mystères de Paris (1943), Rocambole (1948) - and it with these films that he was at his most inspired.  The extraordinary, transcendent beauty of La Duchesse de Langeais (which owes as much to its cinematographer Christian Matras as to its director) makes it one of cinema's finest Balzac adaptations, and a testament to the remarkable heights that French filmmaking attained during the period of Nazi Occupation.

The playwright Jean Giraudoux takes Honoré de Balzac's fairly unsatisfying account of an impossible romance (one that reads like a transparent metaphor of the French Revolution) and reworks it into a succinct poem of breathtaking spiritual purity and immense emotional impact.  With such a sublime script, Baroncelli could hardly fail to deliver a truly great piece of cinema (one of only a handful he made in the course of his long and productive career), and with standards exceptionally high in just about every department (including set and costume design), La Duchesse de Langeais has all the qualities needed to make it an unqualified masterpiece.

The casting of Edwige Feuillère and Pierre Richard-Willm in the lead roles is, however, the film's masterstroke (their being the two biggest names in French cinema at the time certainly did the film no harm at the box office).  Neither actor has given a more moving screen performance and, assisted by generous use of big close-ups (framed and illuminated with exceptional artistry), both attain the pinnacle of their art as they lay bare their characters' inner suffering and lure us into their private hell.  It's hard to think of another film of this era in which the destructive power of love - the kind of love that warps the soul like malignant fingers in soft putty and makes existence a torrent of unbearable feeling - is rendered with such savage vigour and heartbreaking impact.

La Duchesse de Langeais is one of the greatest of all French love films, and it is impossible to put into words how profoundly it troubles the heart with its climactic moment as the heroine yields to her martyrdom of passion, whilst her lover, a proud soldier reduced to a broken doll, watches in abject despair.  Released two years into the Occupation, it is possible that the film was intended as an allegory of French resistance, but its theme of romantic love frustrated by the more perverse aspects of human nature (pride, resentment, mistrust and fear) makes it a work of timeless and universal worth.

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1820.  Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, is a prominent socialite who delights in flirting with men who seek in vain to win a place in her affections and her bed.  Married to a wealthy aristocrat whom she has grown to despise, Antoinette revels in the power she has over the supposedly stronger sex but she finally meets her match in Armand de Montriveau, a proud general in Napoleon's army.  Armand succumbs too easily to Antoinette's powers of seduction, but as his desire for the elusive noblewoman intensifies, so does his loathing of her.  In the end, realising he has been made a lauging stock, the general refuses to have anything more to do with Antoinette, but by this time the calculating socialite realises she has lost her heart to him.  Falling prey to an amorous passion she cannot resist, Antoinette sends her reluctant lover a letter telling him she will meet him at the gates of his residence.  If he fails to keep the appointment, she insists she will disappear from his life altogether.  Believing this to be just another of Antoinette's games, Armand refuses to meet her.  When he discovers that her feelings for him are genuine, emotion gets the better of him and he scours Europe, determined to find the woman who has taken possession of his soul...