Marion Cotillard’s Oscar win for her performance in La Vie en Rose marked a triumph for the French film industry… at least until the moment her portrayal in the media shifted from belle of the ball to 9/11-conspiracy-spouting nutjob. Damage to Cotillard’s career will be limited (hey, she already survived A Good Year) but neither her success nor the controversy is likely to do too much to affect the fortunes of French cinema on this continent.

I’d love to know if Cotillard has any conspiracy theories to share on that topic because even the occasional success — like La Vie en Rose, the biggest French film export since Amelie — does little to increase the pitiful number of titles that receive wider circulation in North America. While Molière, Paris Je T’Aime, Lady Chatterley and 2 Days in Paris all put derrieres in seats last year, scores of other worthy films never had a chance to attract audiences. That list doesn’t just include cineaste-approved curios such as La Moustache and La France, but the likes of Tell No One (directed by Cotillard’s boyfriend, Guillaume Canet) and other films that have already proven popular with critics and viewers elsewhere.

I express my tetchiness in hopes of reminding audiences of their good fortune now that one of the most masterful examples of recent French cinema has resurfaced for a local run. (Viewers eager for other Gallic gems can look forward to Cinefranco, which begins March 28.) The latest by French director Jacques Rivette (still busy at the age of 80), The Duchess of Langeais is a superb adaptation of a Balzac novel whose original name (La duchesse de Langeais) provides the film with its English title. For the French release, Rivette preferred the cryptic but thematically pivotal phrase that translates as “Don’t Touch the Ax” — the quality of menace in the French title more accurately reflects the film’s slippery nature and air of suppressed violence.

Arguably the most mischievous of the New Wave directors — who remain amazingly adept and prolific for a bunch of geezers, Rivette’s associates Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais all being in excellent form lately — Rivette rarely misses an opportunity to subvert viewers’ expectations about how a period literary adaptation should behave. Though a love story of sorts, The Duchess of Langeais may be best regarded as a vicious struggle for dominance between the titular aristo (Jeanne Balibar) and Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a sullen hero of the Napoleonic War who demands more than the superficial sorts of dalliances favoured by those in the Duchess’ circle. The majority of the running time is occupied by conversations in which they thrust, parry and do whatever else they can (and not necessarily what polite society permits) to force the other to submit to their will. The potential for tragedy increases as the battle intensifies.

Despite Rivette’s leisurely pacing and his typical disdain for melodrama, the temperature rises precipitously before the fight is through. Consequently, it’s easy to slot The Duchess of Langeais alongside the most celebrated of the director’s occasional costume dramas, his 1966 adaptation of Diderot’s La Religieuse. The Duchess of Langeais’ fierce intelligence and spirit of ruthlessness are miles away from the overwrought theatrics of La Vie en Rose, but hopefully some of the viewers who wept at Cotillard’s incarnation of Piaf will spare a few tears for the ill-fated lovers here.