The English lady of L’Anglaise et le duc ("The Lady and the Duke") is Grace Elliott. Formerly the mistress of the Prince of Wales, Grace became the protégée of the Duke of Orléans, cousin of King Louis XVI of France. An ardent royalist, she lived in France during the Revolution and wrote about it in her memoirs.

In his film of her book, Eric Rohmer has chosen to concentrate on the relationship between Grace (Lucy Russell) and Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus). This approach allows him to outline a debate over the legitimacy of the Revolution, which Orléans supported. But because Rohmer emphasizes the qualities of the text as a text — that is, not so much as literature but as a written report of the conversations of exquisitely verbal people — he never lets us forget that we are looking through the lens of Grace’s unconditional royalism. Since the ideology is so apparent, we’re able to discount it and attend to other matters.

L’Anglaise et le duc is, above all, a tribute to friendship — in particular, that friendship of which the pleasant and cynical maid in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game says that "you might as well talk about the moon at midday": the friendship between a man and a woman. What’s remarkable about Rohmer’s film is that, considered just as a narrative (and L’Anglaise et le duc, like certain films by Griffith, Feuillade, and Lang, presents itself as pure narrative), it deals with the aftermath of a love affair that’s never shown. Grace and Orléans sometimes allude to an earlier, idyllic state of affairs — but only in an oblique and conventional manner that excludes neither nostalgia nor irony and leaves us guessing how far things went between them. Rohmer forces us to adjust to a way of talking about love and friendship that’s utterly different from how we now conceive of these things. And it takes almost the whole of the film, perhaps, before you realize that for these people, "friendship" is not just code for "love," and "I love you" not just a conventional way of saying "I am your friend," but that these words translate an esteem and a devotion that sustain both love and friendship.

Which is not to say that the carnal has no place in L’Anglaise et le duc — on the contrary, the physical is suffocatingly present. With dry factuality, Rohmer shows us details of mortified flesh: legs of corpses piled in a wagon; a princess’s head on a pole; the body of a bony, lame, half-extinguished marquis (Léonard Cobiant) jammed between two mattresses to elude a Jacobin patrol. And there’s Grace’s often semi-undressed body (many scenes take place in her bedroom), of whose graces we’re reminded by the leers and obscenities of the louts into whose hands she falls.

In the exterior scenes, Rohmer (who shot the film on digital video) composits images of actors over paintings representing the streets, boulevards, and houses of Revolution-era Paris and Meudon. The very guilelessness of such artificiality is appealing, and in such details as a crescent moon overlooking Grace’s nocturnal flight from Paris, or a little road winding up a hill at the end of a street, L’Anglaise et le duc surpasses any recent digital superproduction in its love of pure pictorialism (for which the key precedent in Rohmer’s work is Perceval le Gallois, with its painted medieval backgrounds).

The splendid decorum of both the film and its actors (Russell, Bette Davis–like in her passionate self-possession, is ideal, as is the florid, punctilious Dreyfus) lets Rohmer make great cinema out of movements that would go for nothing in an ordinary film. The textuality is so heady and so nuanced that when Grace steps forward at her trial before the Comité de Surveillance to read a letter, the moment is epiphanic. So is her final tribute to the Duke, which takes the form of an adjustment to the décor of her salon. The dual strength of Rohmer’s filmmaking — its patience with the intricacies of dialogue and its sensitivity to the spiritual qualities of architecture and landscape — finds in these scenes a triumphant reaffirmation.