Back in 1994 the French cinematographer Yves Angelo made an impressive directorial debut with an adaptation of Balzac's novella Le Colonel Chabert, starring Gerard Depardieu as a Napoleonic cavalry officer returning belatedly to find himself an outsider in the heartless, transformed Paris of 1817. Now the 79-year-old New Wave veteran Jacques Rivette has taken a similar Balzac story, La Duchesse de Langeais, set in the same period and filmed it as Don't Touch the Axe (Ne Touchez Pas la Hache) with Depardieu's lookalike son Guillaume as an aristocratic Napoleonic general finding it difficult to adjust himself to the brittle, snobbish Paris of the 1820s. In particular the film centres on his search for a coquettish married woman (Jeanne Balibar) who has fled from the fashionable world where their public game of courtship and seduction has became a matter of widespread, censorious gossip. She's become a Carmelite nun, and the film unfolds in flashback after a five-year search has brought him to her convent in Majorca. It's slow but not intolerably so, subtle and beautifully mounted.