With Godard, Jacques Rivette has staunchly upheld Nouvelle Vague and Cahiers du Cinéma  (of which he was once editor-in-chief) in a half-century’s small output of controversial films. At a few days short of eighty, he brings The Duchess of Langeais/Ne touchez pas la hache as opening night feature to Lincoln Center’s ninth “Film Comments Selects,” where it fits the director’s track record of eliciting marveling praise or stifled yawns.

This “not an adaptation [but] a ‘compression’” of an Honoré de Balzac story at first titled “Don’t Touch the Axe,” is shorter than Rivette’s earlier fabled four-to-thirteen-hour features, but still should have been cut from its just under two-and-a-half-hours by doing away with the frame, particularly the poetic romanticism of final silly swashbuckling.

The meat of the tale, all flashback explaining that excrescent framing device, is understated period piece dealing with time and the inexplicable contrariness of love. Romantic love, its illegality and unattainability, derives from Arthurian and medieval chivalric romance, to which commentators from the metaphysical poets onwards have appended the theme that the lover pines for what he thinks he cannot have, then thinks he does not want it when the forbidden door is at last open. This dying for the beloved’s favors followed by rejection of that very object of desire, is found in puppy love as well as many mature manifestations, and it is a shame that, seeking instant gratification, a majority of younger viewers will lack the patience to savor and recognize themselves in that old sweet game.

Love is a cruel taskmaster. Witness the military commander of Majorca nervously nearing the end of a five-year hunt for his sweetheart. Of a family becoming France’s Fondas, Guillaume Depardieu is Armand de Montriveau, a “pupil of Bonaparte” who has survived the Emperor’s Waterloo. The actor lost a leg to long complications following a motorcycle accident, so the General is stiff-kneed entering an unprecedented chaperoned interview with a Barefoot Carmelite soeur. She is St. Theresa (Jeanne Balibar), his former Paris love whose present position was to be repeated in Claire of Henry James’s 1876 The American.

Dissolve to 1818, when she was the Duchess of Langeais, a pampered wife with a husband conveniently never around, and tireless among the gay capital’s beautiful people partygoers. At a ball hostessed by ubiquitous friend Clara de Serizy (Anne Cantineau), the Duchess notices the morose seated military man whose “courage and constancy” are on everyone’s lips, and for the following day at her own house, arranges the continuation of his account of adventures.

The taciturn hero determines to make the lady his mistress, while, all conventional coquettishness and sympathetic curiosity, she is moved by his suffering during a celebrated flight across African desert. With seducer’s goals, he’s hardly the unsuspecting Moor; nor is she virginal in feigned female weakness and comically posed dishabille, although she feels strongly like Desdemona for “the dangers I had passed.”

The cat-and-mouse goes on at a stately pace too slow for some, time marked by mantelpiece clocks and lame titles of passing hours or days: at her aristocrat’s residence and, parquet floors creaking, at rounds of evening parties, candlelit to Boccherini strings, graced by the ladies in bodice-flattening Empire-waisted colors.

Catholic to his atheist, she basks in the devotedness, half-knowing if at all that the game is dangerous, for her blunt soldier is not a man of maneuvers and strategic siege. Though love may come, she bears society’s stamp of propriety and, admonished by pragmatic family, wants to remain within the appearance of respectability. Neither of the two willfully cruel but each egotistical in insisting on playing by his or her rules, having the cake and eating it as well, they reach a stalemate to be unblocked by a gambit which, too late, brings unfeigned emotion to the fore.

Spoiled and self-willed they are, but not the malicious debauched century-earlier nobility of several filmings of Les liaisons dangereuses, Rivette’s couple are caught in the web of what they are and what convention and training require them to be. A saber scar on his cheek, Depardieu’s Armand is too soldierly stoic to be as effective as might be, while the surrounding cast of aristocrats and hangers-on is cold and removed, though appropriately so; more life is to be felt in Antoinette’s man and maid Julien and Lisette (Mathias Jung, Julie Judd), complicit and also getting it on themselves in the scullery. Above the lovers’ war and the carefully restrained sets, Balibar is radiant in Antoinette’s deception and self-deception that speak of and to all lovers, male as well as female. 

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)