L'intouchable

THE UNTOUCHABLE requires patience on the part of the viewer - patience to stay with this sullen, dark and clunky film to the end only to discover the wait was not worth the patience! Writer/director Benoît Jacquot had a good idea: trace the search for a biological father to a country foreign to the seeker. What results instead of a journey of self-discovery is a travelogue to India as captured by a hand held camera with what appears to be a minuscule budget.

Jeanne (Isild Le Besco) discovers on her eighteenth birthday that her mother (Bérangère Bonvoisin) conceived her on the banks of the Ganges River in India with an Indian man who remains unknown. Furious at her mother's secret and feeling the profound need to connect with her biological father, Jeanne, an actress, leaves her acting workshop to make a racy film in order to make enough money to travel to India. Once in India she searches for traces of her father without success. But the search is not without some interest for the viewer: the hand held camera that follows her through the airport and the countryside and to Benares (that city by the Ganges where the dead are cremated in elaborate fashion and the living bathe in the waters of the holy river). She gathers clues as to her father's identity from friendly strangers, but alas, the riddle remains unsolved.

Isild Le Besco is in practically every frame of this film and she indeed is an interesting actress to watch. But the lack of intelligent dialogue prevents this film from revealing motivations or character development, opting instead for a static (and rather poorly edited and scored) glance at the mysteries of India. For those interested in watching in detail the preparation of bodies for cremation and the slow act of that ritual, this is a film worth watching. For the casual viewer it is tedious. Grady Harp

When Jeanne, a young actress, is told by her mother her father is an Indian she once met on the banks of the River Ganges she is upset. Soon after, she decides to leave everything behind (the play she is rehearsing, her companion who directs her in the play) and to fly to India where she hopes (and /or fears) to trace and meet her biological father.

From such a premise the viewer is entitled to expect a powerful work, some initiatory journey to the end of the world and to the bottom of the heart. Alas and alack! strong emotions are not invited.

Not that Benoît Jacquot's last movie is bad. It has at least two qualities, the first one being the excellent acting of omnipresent Ilsid Le Besco, the director's young muse. Almost always on the screen, she shows she believes in her role and she gives it her full throughout. She really deserves the Marcello Mastroianni Prize she was awarded at the last Venice Film Festival for her performance as the troubled young lady. The second good point of the film is its neo-realistic approach to the filming of the Indian scenes. Jeanne is most often followed by a steadicam operator as she walks through crowds of strangers or as she wanders in a country she does not understand. All the shots are taken in continuity, in an unsophisticated way, in real-life places where the passers-by, not being warned in advance, look at the camera in astonishment. What little fiction there is seems like carved out of raw reality. The trouble is that this device soon turns into a gimmick. There are too many scenes of the kind described above and not enough sequences showing what Jeanne thinks or feels and describing how she evolves. This strange new world should have been seen through Jeanne's eyes whereas the camera stays outside her all too often. What we see is Jeanne AND India not how India AFFECTS Jeanne. Fortunately there are a few exceptions to this basic rule, particularly the amusing scene featuring a couple of French homosexual tourists by a swimming-pool and the unexpected subsequent sequence of the visit to the nun. But, on the whole, being content to film the main character and the local people in real-life locations is not enough. Even the wedding sequence, beautiful to see as it is, remains frustratingly shallow. Why on earth didn't Jacquot make a pure documentary instead of opting for a fiction he failed to develop sufficiently?

"L'Intouchable" could have been a major work. As it is, it is just passable. Thanks to Ilsid Le Besco and the photogenic qualities of India the worst is avoided but only just.

this film punishes the senses deliberately, subjecting its audience to a ripping gauntlet of painful visual and aural textures. our eyeballs are lacerated by the relentlessly jumpy hand-held camera, pans too swift to apprehend without nausea, and the barrage of disorientingly abrupt jump cuts. ears attacked by the harsh banausic soundtrack, pounded by soulless machinery, everything torturously intrusive and overloud, even tap water, where even sitar and tabla are twisted into instruments of pain.

jacquot's apparent rationale for this mortification of our senses is to replicate the pains of a journey of spiritual self-discovery, whose immemorial signposts feature suffering, danger, and abnegation. traditional pilgrims crippled themselves crawling to shrines on their knees. jacquot's pilgrim is a young woman, Jeanne, brought up by her single mother, never feeling at home in society or in her skin, who learns around her 18th birthday that she was conceived in Benares of an Indian father, and compulsively undertakes a voyage seeking him, her roots, herself, a voyage that she insists on financing by painful humiliation.

Isild le Besco, portraying Jeanne, provides a pitch-perfect, nail-on-chalkboard personification of the skin-shredding pilgrim. Using her acting skills and flesh mercilessly, le Besco forces us to internalize the gnawing estrangement, rage, and bafflement that eat at Jeanne like a cancer. The audience is never at ease looking at Jeanne, even when she is getting a massage. Her vulnerability is unendurable, verging always on the razor edge of victimization and violation. le Besco appears to have fattened up her body for this role, especially her hips, which works very well for it, bringing her character to the far edge of voluptuousness, on the point of losing it.

At a Lincoln Center Q&A, Jacquot emphasized repeatedly how crucial it is for a director not to be cognizant of what he is doing. For all his genuine charm, he seemed tormented by hyper-rationality, determined to rid himself of this daemon. The Untouchable, with all its scourging of the senses, seems like his desperate attempt to purge himself of it, like burning away the flesh of corpses in Benares. But doesn't that deliver the film as a triumph of just the kind of rationality that he made it to escape?

For me Jacquot's rip-tide--reason trying to trick away reason by mortifying the senses--made The Untouchable a film that i found almost too painful to watch. The theory was enjoyable to contemplate--as were moments of beauty and mystery--but his programmatic bloodying of my poor eyes and ears gave me a headache so bad that I had to fight to keep from vomiting. Nonetheless, I can't help admiring the good work, thoughtfulness, and courage (to create something so rebarbative) that went into it's creation. Would that Jacquot had trusted those moments of beauty and mystery, allowed them to take off free of the visual and aural punishment, lifted the veil of supplices.

It's beginning to look as if Benoît Jacquot's fascination with the sloe-eyed young Isild Le Besco is leading him astray. À tout de suite, his last film, like this one featuring her as the main character, started up promisingly as a criminal love story but then wandered off into an aimless travelogue. Here he depicts his muse taking a quick trip to India to find her long-lost, never-met dad. But this time the film starts off without much of a pulse, and then wanders of. . .into an aimless travelogue. Maybe it's time to go out and look for a more solid scenario, instead of finding excuses to show off Isild's nice breasts and bum. The former are featured in the first half, when the character Le Besco plays, a mediocre film actress, is being shot having simulated sex. The latter comes in for loving examination when, while in India in search of her father, she lies down for a naked massage and gets oiled up. Whatever "untouchable" means, it doesn't refer to the camera's relationship to Isild Le Besco's body. The breasts and the bum are very nice indeed. But their inclusion in this film is blatantly gratuitous. In between the body shots, there are some nice ones of Isild's striking but not always very expressive face. It's often inexpressive here because she isn't allowed to react much, except when she's (over-) playing Saint Joan and in a scene when she meets a French nun (Caroline Champetier, also the cinematographer) whose gay brother has come to India to visit her.

But that excitement comes later. First, Jeanne (Le Besco) has a birthday, and after she blows out the candles on her cake she's washing the dishes when her mother (Bérangère Bonvoisin) tells her that her father was a man she met traveling in India and that he was an untouchable. Hearing this, she gives up being rehearsed in Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards by her lover (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing). She needs money for her trip so she goes to her agent (Manuel Munz) and accepts a film role she had previously rejected (the sex scene) to get an advance. Shooting the scene is like a "calvary" for her, or at least that is the director's intention. It might be one for the viewer as well, were it not for the breasts, and it's hard to distinguish a suffering actress from a bad actress. If she's an actress at all, couldn't she pretend to be feeling pleasure? But instead in a sense she remains "untouchable." If this is self-conscious and awkward film-making, so is the fact that a sage elder untouchable (Yaseen Khan) just happens to be sitting next to Jeanne on her flight to India. He explains that some untouchables are very rich. He is mysteriously spirited away during the flight, which is left unexplained. When Jeanne gets to Benares, she finds the family of her father, evidently one of the rich ones, with astonishing speed. A young family member named Mani (Parikshit Luthra) approaches her while she's watching corpses being ritually cremated by the Ganges and though she says she doesn't want to, he arranges for her to come to the family seat where relatives are soon to assemble for a daughter's wedding. Her father, Anpar (Rakesh Sharma), turns out not to have come. She goes to the town where he teaches school and watches him in the classroom, but, giving "untouchable" a third meaning, she follows him later but then turns away, and flies back to Paris where her theater director lover, who picks her up, is pledged not to ask her any questions about what has happened. While À tout de suite was shot in DV black and white, this film was shot in 16 mm. Jacquot manages to avoid conventional prettiness in the Indian sequences, but it is hard not to see some of them as repetitive and ill-lit. Longeurs outweigh moments of perception in this self-indulgent, lazy film.

Deborah Young's review of The Untouchable in Variety describes it as "A strong candidate for empty French art film of the year." It indeed seems astonishingly slight coming from the maker of Seventh Heaven, The School of Flesh, and Sade. This is at least Jacquot's fourth film in which Le Besco figures, each with increasing importance, but diminishing effect. She is beginning to seem like a damaging obsession for the director as well as a proto-Adjani. Happily it seems Jacquot's next project, Le beau monde, features Fanny Ardent and Isabelle Huppert.

Opened in Paris Decenber 6, 2006. To be shown at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center March 8 and 10, at the IFC Center March 7, 2007. US distributor Strand Releasing.

A young French actress (Isild LeBesco) finds out from her mother that her biological father was Indian. So she decides to go to India to look for any traces of him.

Isild LeBesco is one of the more interesting young French actresses, even if this isn't one of her more interesting movies, aside from some travelogue footage of parts of India only your most adventurous tourist would ever set foot in. LeBesco is definitely talented, and unlike her American peers, she rarely takes a role she isn't willing to do full-frontal nudity for (she's kind of like a French Kate Winslet). To finance her trip to India in this movie, for instance, her actress character agrees to do a gratuitous nude scene in a sleazy movie. Ironically, this scene in THIS movie is also rather gratuitous, as is a later scene in India where her character gets a naked rubdown. But, hey, LeBesco is a cute girl with a great body, so who am I to complain if she wants to show it off in typical Gallic fashion?

Besides the interesting, um, scenery though, this is not a very dramatically compelling movie. LeBesco's character sits next to an "untouchable" on the plane who meets a bad fate. She accompanies one half of a gay male couple to a nunnery to meet his sister where other "untouchables" have taken refuge. There's an obvious parallel here about LeBesco's character being a kind of "untouchable" on account of her uncertain parentage (never mind that the actress herself looks very, very touchable). The message though remains pretty muddled, despite the usual solid acting effort by LeBesco. This movie is not without interest, but it's not great either.