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Don't Touch the Axe is a highbrow adaptation of Balzac's novella La Duchesse de Langeais directed by French New Wave whizz Jacques Rivette. Set among the balls of Restoration Paris, it centres on a brittle affair between Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu) and Antoinette, Duchess of Langeais (Jeanne Balibar), which leads to scandal and humiliation. No lavish costume drama, it's instead a theatrical dissection of the spiteful games lovers play.

It begins in 1823 as exhausted solider Armand searches convents for the woman he loved and lost. Five years earlier, we watch the couple meet for the first time. Armand seduces Antoinette with tales of military campaigns in Africa, where he was captured by savages. Enraptured, she leads him on, teasing then refusing him. A proud man, he bristles stiffly and what was a simple flirtation becomes something darker: "Steel against steel, we will see which heart is sharpest," he threatens.

"THE SLIGHTEST HINT OF A DROLL SMILE"

With his braided uniform and painful limp, the soldier is unprepared for the fight ahead of him. Balibar's contradictory beauty - horse-faced yet seductively coquettish - gives her character the upper hand, but is she playing with fire? "He is akin to the eagle," warns one onlooker prophetically. "You will not tame him." Rivette, who at 79 has made thirty films, observes the action with a veteran's jaded eye and just the slightest hint of a droll smile. The cryptic title sums up the emotional violence that simmers beneath the film's mannered surface. "Don't touch the axe," says Armand, recalling a story about the weapon that decapitated Charles I. "I don't wish your pretty head to fall."

Don't Touch The Axe is out in the UK on 28th December 2007.