in the english-language film tradition, historical drama
comes heavily laden with a legacy of fustian, swagger and
bombast. In the recent Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007),
Clive Owen’s Sir Walter Raleigh contributes to England’s
battle against the Armada by plunging into the Channel
for a brisk underwater sequence. In last year’s British Shot by Rivette’s regular director of photography,
prestige hit Atonement, the camera executes a virtuoso William Lubtchansky, largely in a selection of severe and
four-minute single-take Steadicam manoeuvre around the claustrophobic interiors, the film ostensibly seems static and
troops stranded on Dunkirk beach: the setting may be the theatrical, yet its dominant sense of containment heightens
Second World War, but the rules of costume-drama the frenetic melodrama that later emerges: notably when a
grandiosity prevail. Byronically scowling Armand threatens to brand his mistress
A more measured approach to historical fiction is on the forehead, and in his final cloak-and-dagger attempt to
currently triumphing in France, although Romantic inflation kidnap Antoinette from her clifftop convent.
has traditionally had its place there too: notably in the In the Paris sequences, however, the drama is rooted
Provençal reveries of Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette and in clashing codes of sentimental conduct. Armand’s military
Manon des Sources diptych (1986) and the 1990 blockbuster brusqueness and will to conquest is disarmed by the arch-
Cyrano de Bergerac. The past year, however, has seen a coquette Antoinette’s feints, stratagems and invocation of
resurgence of a more contained, cerebral mode of costume propriety: a conflict compellingly portrayed in a series of
drama, one that marries Romantic excess with the analytical intense two-hander scenes. More than a love story, the film is
and discursive rigour of France’s novelistic tradition. Three an enquiry into styles of social and emotional performance.
new films in particular come markedly closer to chamber Guillaume Depardieu’s angular, bulky nerviness makes a
drama than to grand opera: executed with austere control, striking foil for the consummately knowing poise of Jeanne
and though paying close critical regard to their literary Balibar, a fabulously artful performer who makes Antoinette’s
models, they can be considered uncinematic only if you think every languid moue and half-whispered protestation itself an
courtesy Artificial Eye,
,
of historical cinema as pageantry with plumed hats. act of elegant stagecraft.
In some ways, the most traditional of the three is No less rigorous and measured is Une Vieille Maîtresse
Jacques Rivette’s Ne Touchez Pas la Hache (Don’t Touch (The Last Mistress), by Catherine Breillat, writer and director
the Axe), a remarkably faithful adaptation of Balzac’s novel of such sexually confrontational work as Romance (1999),
La Duchesse de Langeais (1834). Set in Restoration Paris, Anatomie de l’Enfer (2004) and A Ma Soeur! (2001). Based
it recounts the love between society belle Antoinette de on an 1851 novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Breillat’s film
Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) and Napoleonic general Armand recounts the explicitly carnal amours of Parisian dandy
de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu). As in Balzac’s Ryno (languidly androgynous newcomer Fu’ad Aït Aattou)
original, the story is framed by the couple’s ill-fated reunion and scandalous Spanish courtesan Vellini (Asia Argento).
, 2007 (dir Jacques Rivette)
five years later in a Mallorcan convent, Antoinette having Assertively a feminist reappropriation of its source novel,
, 2007 (dir Catherine Breillat), courtesy STUDIOCANAL, Paris
gone into retreat as a Carmelite nun. The body of the Breillat’s film, like Rivette’s, analyses social and sexual codes
narrative comprises an extended flashback to the couple’s and perceptions – the past’s, but also our own – within a
amours, which begin as flirtation and then develop into specific time and milieu. Like Ne Touchez Pas la Hache, where
emotional politicking and outright war before reaching a decorum gradually gives way to violence and melodrama,
tragic conclusion that hangs, with bitter irony, on a last-ditch Breillat’s film leads us to expect a discreetly talky study of
rendezvous missed because of a clock running slow. mores, only to dismantle costume-drama conventions as Ne Touchez Pas la Hache
Vellini’s uncontainable sexuality corrodes social and generic
Une Vieille Maîtresse
certainties alike. >
from left: London;
93 Artreview
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