Although much of the dialogue [in "Die Marquise von O …"] is taken word for word from Kleist's story, sometimes transferred from reported to direct speech, the director has also made use of the rare device of projecting whole sentences from the original on the screen, in print, to emphasize turning points in the story, and above all to convey those thoughts and guesses at motivation—those contents of mind—which action alone cannot intimate. Although the director follows the text closely in the film's mood and images, it is as if his veneration for Kleist's idiosyncratic style would not be satisfied with interpretation by actors and cameraman—the printed word must still be the vehicle of the creator's essential comments….

The film brilliantly translates into visual experience the opening scene in which the nocturnal Russian attack on a North Italian citadel is endured by the occupants. Kleist's sense of domestic detail and of the helplessness of children, and the nightmare realism of scurrying, aimless flight inside a burning trap are brought to life in a few seconds of film which recall, and surpass, the effect of reading his few corresponding sentences of reportage. The subsequent slowing down of the film into an almost stately deliberation never becomes a beautiful bore, because a kind of stored energy has been generated in that first scene of eros and violence. Surprise is promised, and the promise is kept by the behaviour of the characters if not entirely by the plot (the Marquise von O … may be at a loss to understand how she became pregnant, but we are not). Eric Rohmer, like Kleist himself, makes full use of the genre-painting possibilities of the theme while keeping to a stage-sized perspective….

With its tension between the incongruity, indeed the absurdity, of the story's central event, and its circumstantial, syntactically complex narrative—much of it is cast in the elaborate grammar of reported speech—"Die Marquise von O…" is an immensely German work; not only that: both its prose and its morality belong to the last years of the pre-Romantic age. M Rohmer is an eminently faithful interpreter: he takes us into the very heart of Kleist's story, yet he never allows this strangeness of time and place to lapse.