The title of this latest film from veteran director Jacques Rivette echoes timely advice given to the heroine. Quoting a warning to Tower of London visitors, it reminds that love can be just as dangerous. Audiences should brace themselves for a story which for all its historical-pageant appeal carries a damaging edge.

Guillaume Depardieu, (son of Gerard and brother of Julie) plays the lovelorn General de Montriveau, hero of many a Napoleonic skirmish, returned to society like Captain Wentworth to Jane Austen’s Bath. Recalling a raft of doomed romances from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’, a gripping series of anticipations and reversals, manipulations and melodramatic gestures screw up the tension.

That Guillaume stands or sits scowling for the first section of the film, having tracked his lost sweetheart to a Majorcan Convent where she remains behind bars, is understandable. After all, his has been a five-year search. Besides, he his not welcome. As someone hisses from the pew behind him: ‘There are Frenchman everywhere it seems’; a resentful reference to Napoleon having claimed the Spanish throne. An injured foot makes him stomp about noisily, especially across polished wood floors, and his face seems screwed into a permanent frown, except when he breaks out in angry tantrums. There is no tenderness or irony in his prisoner-of-love role, which made his father so appealing in his recent appearance as ‘The Singer’. Guillaume may have won a Cesar for most promising actor in 1997 and played a number of roles since, but here he is allowed only a very narrow range.


Jeanne Balibar as Antoinette, Duchess of Langeais, may be past her prime, but is capable of suggesting the vivacity which once made her the toast of the Parisian salons and captured the heart of the absent Duke, her husband. The alternating bouts of self-possession and gaunt-eyed longings reveal a woman of rank trapped in an unforgiving social order. When she finds she can’t handle the anguish, it’s too late. Maturity adds to her pathos and if her scruples exasperate it is because the film requires a tremendous leap of empathy.

Five years before the convent visit the Admiral had decided to make Antoinette his mistress after an encouraging encounter at one of the nightly dances she attends. It is difficult, these days,to sympathise with the religious and moral scruples cited by Antoinette, especially as Desdemona-like in the early stages of the courtship she has encouraged Armand to visit her house so he can relate his adventures in the desert. The salon setting is, she claims, too distracting.

Adapted from a story by Balzac, author of ‘Les Miserables’ , the events are true to the text, the literary origins signalled by printed commentaries that punctuate the scenes. Here 1810 society has none of the frivolity and banter that characterised Tirard’s ‘Moliere’ but gives way to the staid propriety of the quadrille. In this circle Antoinette’s friend is moved to admire a lady because ‘no-one can hold a snuff-box like her’.


Although Antoinette appears to think Armand will accept a platonic relationship, despite warnings that ‘He is akin to an eagle – you will not tame him’ he soon disabuses her by arranging a kidnapping, unexpected in what has otherwise been a to-ing and fro-ing that has gone on for weeks. He is a man accustomed to conquest; she is a product of a world where respectability rules. It’s a case of ‘steel against steel’ and when he realises she won’t be frightened he decides to let go. Expectations are once again deflated.

The director serves up plenty of visual distractions: a panoply of well-dressed cynics advise Antoinette in rooms aglow with gilded panelling and fin-de-siecle furniture, recalling films like ‘Le Ronde’ where gossip rules and satin waist-coats and powdered wigs mix with bosom-revealing empire gowns and beribboned ringlets. Fans and huge vases of roses are employed in self-conscious poses. Contrasted with the elegance and violins of the spacious houses where Antoinette encounters the demi-monde are her private rooms with their crackling log fires, candelabras and discreet servants. Here Antoinette sings a doleful song about flight from beloved shores, a melody which, overheard in the Majorcan convent, convinces Armand later that he has found his beloved.

The exterior scenes, too, are enchanting. Paris Streets with horse-carriages in Winter contrast with the brilliance of a Majorcan Summer and the ancient stone walls of the convent fortress-like above the cliffs, flanked by a flowery meadow. The cloisters and torchlight of Armand’s henchmen during their raid recall scenes from ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’. Reflecting the light-and-shade mood swings of the tortured lovers, the mise-en-scene provides a visual treat in an otherwise dark and claustrophobic tale of infinitely deferred consummation. You have been warned.