The two lovers in "The Duchess of Langeais" are often separated by walls - real ones, as well as divides of social expectations and self-imposed pride - and their passion burns more fiercely for it.

Director Jacques Rivette, the now-80-year-old co-founder of the French New Wave movement, stokes those fires by putting the two characters in the same room and almost never letting them touch. The heat comes from the distance and the obstacles placed between them.

This love affair, based on an Honoré de Balzac novella, is set primarily in 1818 in Paris. In the salons and balls of high society, Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), the married Duchess of Langeais, encounters a new face: Armand (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard), the Marquis de Montriveau, recently returned from serving in the French army.

The Marquis is instantly smitten and privately vows to make the Duchess his mistress. The Duchess is also taken with the Marquis - note how carefully she lays herself out on the divan before he visits - but is determined not to fall to him. Their mutual stubbornness escalates the tension between them, reaching a breaking point that is doomed (as we see from the film's prologue, set five years later) to leave them both shattered.

Rivette stages this battle of romantic gamesmanship with deceptively placid scenes, employing a stately formalism (even using title cards between scenes, as in a silent film) that heightens the societal constraints to them consummating their affair.

He has cast his leads perfectly for this war of hearts. Balibar - with her angular, patrician face and demeanor - looks natural as the high-society coquette. Depardieu, with his rough-hewn features and authentic limp (his leg was amputated in 2003, after infection from a 1996 motorcycle crash), fully embodies the Marquis' war-weary melancholy. Together, they strike substantial sparks as they battle each other and the circumstances that keep them apart.

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-- Sean P. Means can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@ sltrib.com.

The Duchess of Langeais

Where Broadway Centre Cinemas.

When Opens Friday.

Rating Not rated, but probably PG-13 for sexual content and some violence.

Running time 137 minutes; in French with subtitles

Bottom line A heartbreaking duet of unrequited love in 19th-century Paris.