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The Princess of Montpensier
Director: Bertrand Tavernier
Country/Year: France/Germany, 2010
Opening: April 8
Where: Limited
MADAME DE LA FAYETTE, WRITING anonymously in the 17th century, equidistant in time between Cervantes and Defoe, helped originate the novel form, bringing to its development not only a woman's point of view but probing psychological acuity. Celebrated, more in France than here, for La Princesse de Clèves, she also wrote, in 1662, a short story called "La Princesse de Montpensier" - a roundelay of marital and sexual cross-purposes set against the 16th-century conflict between Catholics and Huguenots, so plot-driven and devoid of descriptions (hardly an adjective interrupts the action) that it reads quite like a film treatment. Bertrand Tavernier has expanded it into a sly, alluring, and at times unsettling examination of the parallels between violence in the public and private spheres, in a society where a young woman, great in beauty and wealth, may be traded as chattel and pursued as the doe in a competitive hunt. He has made an intimate epic, as coolly calculated as a chess match, in...