The Lady and the Duke

Leave it to Rohmer, now 82, to find a way to bend current technique to the service of a vision of the past that is faithful to both architectural glories and commanding open spaces of the city as it was more than two centuries ago.

Nothing short of a technical marvel and a ravishing movie to look at.

Whenever the subtleties of political morality get a bit overbearing, there's a respite in the painterly streets of Paris, where, we are reminded, the past was another city, strange and resistant to present-day adornments.

What comes out in the storytelling is the way our actions emerge from a tangle of sympathies, personal loyalties or debts owed, preexisting relationships we take for granted, and professed ideologies.