Though she wouldn’t be recognized on an American street, the French actress Jeanne Balibar has worked with some of the world’s greatest living filmmakers — Jacques Rivette and Raul Ruiz come to mind — and quite a few of her country’s most acclaimed, including Olivier Assayas (“Clean,” “Late August, Early September”) and Arnaud Desplechin (“My Sex Life,” “La Sentinelle”). Though Ms. Balibar, who turns 40 in April, can convey keenly drawn and subtly sophisticated characters in contemporary settings that anatomize life in postmodern France, she turns back the clock for her latest effort.

Reunited with the 79-year-old Mr. Rivette, for whom she worked in “Va Savoir” (2001), Ms. Balibar takes the title role in “The Duchess of Langeais,” which arrives in theaters next Friday and is known in Europe by the title of the Balzac story from which it is adapted, “Don’t Touch the Axe.” Set in Paris during the 1820s, the chamber drama is a Restoration version of a theme Smokey Robinson sang so well: The hunter is captured by the game. The duchess plays coquette to an ardent swain (Guillaume Depardieu’s uxorious General Armand de Montriveau) who grows desperately vexed over her Ne pas toucher attitude.

Ms. Balibar uses her unconventional beauty to give the character a bewitching allure. But one night, Mr. Depardieu’s lovesick fool wises up and flips the script, and it’s the duchess who begins to pine away, as the cat-and-mouse game takes an increasingly tragic turn.

“The way Jacques and I and Guillaume decided to work, we didn’t really care about the fact that it was a period movie,” Ms. Balibar said recently. “There were many other things that would do the job: the costumes, the décor. We thought it would be amusing to be as contemporary as possible in that framework. The language was different, anyway. We felt like we had to go against the …” The actress paused for a moment on the long-distance line from France, looking for the right way to translate a word into English. “… restrictions, the restrictions that mark all the exoticism of another period.”

Though “The Duchess of Langeais” may strike some viewers as atypical of Mr. Rivette, whose films of the 1960s and ’70s, especially, took improvisatory flight in a Paris where fabulist imaginings often blurred with the lives of his characters, it’s consistent with his love of Balzac, and of the theatrical. Though other actors make appearances, including Barbet Schroeder, Bulle Ogier, and Michel Piccoli, the movie could as easily be a two-person stage play.

“Originally, it was going to be a very different story,” Ms. Balibar said, noting that the piece was written with herself and Mr. Depardieu in mind. “It was a story with computers, and murder. But then Jacques said, ‘I asked the whole of world literature if they wanted to join the crew and write a script. Henry James came up but he wasn’t what we were looking for. And then Balzac, and he was what we were looking for in particular.'”

Ms. Balibar first encountered the story as a child. “I remember I read it twice in a row,” she said. “Why was that? I was fascinated with her, because she was so fierce. And I would say secondly because that was a wildly passionate love affair, even though I couldn’t quite figure out why at the time.”

There is still much mystery in the character, whose motivations confound everyone around her. On the set, the actors sorted out their performances without heavy-handed direction. “There were no rehearsals,” Ms. Balibar said. “Jacques would say, ‘Yeah, okay,’ or ‘No, maybe you should go in that direction.’ He has a way of watching. He knows how to convey to you what he wants. He always says, ‘I want to go to the set and see what happens.'”

Ms. Balibar is divorced from the French actor (and her occasional director and co-star) Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and grew up as the daughter of a Marxist intellectual and a quantum physicist. Her career is spread among the stage, screen, and studio, as she also tours and records as a vocalist in a cabaret-electronica style. “I’m not more committed to this or that,” she said, while mentioning the five films she shot in succession last year. “I like to let it nourish what I do. When I make a movie, I love having done something different just before.”

As for Mr. Rivette, there’s a hint that Ms. Balibar may miss the fully improvisatory nature of his signature films, which were made when she was a toddler. “L’Amour Fou” (1969), which juxtaposed footage of a theatrical production with the romantic meltdown of its director and his actress girlfriend (Ms. Ogier), remains a favorite.

“I loved the cruelty of it, mixed with the fantastic,” she said. “It was so playful, because of the way the actors were working at the time. I think maybe they were high! They were so playful, and yet the whole time the story they were telling was so cruel.”