Ne touchez pas la hache

Okay, I'll admit it. I've only seen a couple of Jacques Rivette's films apart from this one (Celine & Julie Go Boating & Le Belle Noisettes). I had heard prior to seeing those that Rivette was always one to make it difficult for audiences (timing being one:a standard Rivette film clocks in no less than two and a half hours). 'Ne Touchez Pas La Hache' is a beautifully filmed exercise cinematic narcolepsy. The characters seem to sleepwalk their way throughout this film. A few of the other cinephiles in attendance seemed to get their jollies from this film. To each their own, I say. I guess I should see some more of Rivette's work before I toss in the towel on him (I still prefer Trufaut,or even Goddard,among the French "new wave" directors).

Like several other recent period dramas, this film is lovely to look at but painful to sit through. The plot is trite and thin, the main actors are nothing to look at, and the wearisome long takes of nothing happening is enough to drive you mad. And when you think you're at last going to get a thrilling conclusion, the author and director let you down one final time. This might have made a good, short drama, but at this length it's a trial. And if you're looking for a steamy love story, you should be warned that the most exciting thing in LA DUCHESSE happens to a cigar.

Unless you're assigned to watch this for French Lit class, I would avoid it unless you're a sucker for costumes and period sets. A much better use of your time would be another recent French period piece: MOLIERE, which offers a sort of Gallic "Shakespeare in Love".

Jacques Rivette, who's almost 80 years old, seems now to have definitively abandoned the lighten world he gaves glimpses of in the wonderful "Va Savoir" and in the musical "Haut Bas fragile" (which has more down than up), two movies full of youth and wit. He gets back with "Histoire de Marie et Julien" in 2003 in a darker and saddest universe (and also, let's be honest, a way more boring one). "Ne touchez pas la hache", with its depressive tone, its damaged story and its Balzac's "Histoire des 13" adaptation, definitely belongs to the second part of Rivette's movies (that is darker and boring...), but manage to be much more passioning than Rivette's last opus.

The movie is a cinematographic translation of Balzac's "La Duchesse de Langeais", where everything, from the structure in three parts with a flashback, to the dialogs, is respected. This serious exercise is a little bit academic, but the lack of imagination is tempered by the Romanesque density of the book, which keeps the spectator's interest awake during the all movie. This fidelity to the sad and unconsumed love story sometimes brings interesting and unpredictable changes. The turning point of the movie, which tells the seduction of an intrepid General by duchess full of frivolity, has for example a very different aspect in the book and in the movie, even if it's exactly the same thing. The scene deals with Montriveau kidnapping Antoinette, as a demonstration of his will, love and power, and she'll deadly falls in love with him, as a consequence of this act. In the realistic yet dramatic world of Balzac's "Histoire des 13", this act is absolutely credible and logic, but in the soft and slow universe of Rivette, the scene almost appears unreal, as if it's only one of the Duchesse's phantasm, and you have to wait until the end to get ride of this unreality's veil.

The movie is for that reason absolutely faithful to Balzac, but also absolutely personal and definitely belongs to Rivette's personal universe. And the interest of the movie would have stayed relative, if the actors didn't bring live and movement to this static motion picture. It's indeed Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu (most impressive in a intense and tortured Montriveau-Balzac) that creates the tension and the emotions, which would certainly have lack to this movie without them.

I did not like this film -- I found it difficult to understand, ragged transitions between scenes, and that it had no point, not to mention many unanswered questions and facts that neither matched the film nor fit the plot. The plot was thin and uninteresting. And if this is love, I don't want any part of it! Many others in the theater walked out before it was over. I know Rivette is an excellent director, but I think he fell down on this one. I guess the acting was okay, but there was so little conversation in the film that it was difficult to tell. Frankly, and I'm sorry to say this, it was like watching 4 coats of paint dry -- consecutively. One of the most boring I've ever seen. I would like to know how this film played in France.

The novels of French writer Honore de Balzac concern themselves with the corrupting influence of society's illusions and express disdain for the shallow games people play. This theme is especially present in his short story "Don't Touch the Axe", later titled "La Duchesse de Langeais" after it was incorporated into his larger work known as "La Comedy Humaine". This story that casts aspersions on the artificiality of French high society in the early 1800s and the stilted rules that govern their affairs has now been brought to the screen by 80-year-old French auteur Jacques Rivette. Originally planned in 1948 as a collaboration of the talents of Greta Garbo and James Mason, directed by Max Ophuls, Rivette's thirty-first feature film, The Duchess of Langeais, is a period piece that faithfully follows Balzac's text yet contains touches of Rivette's wry humor in a way that Balzac probably did not envision.

Slow paced and exquisitely detailed, the film opens in a convent on the Spanish isle of Majorca. Armand de Montriveau, a General and a war hero in Napolenon's army is played by Guilliame Depardieu, son of the great French actor Gerard Depardieu. Armand has found his lover, Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), after a five year search and is granted one interview with the now Carmelite nun. Interrupted by intertitles that indicate a character's internal state or the passage of time, the story flashes back five years to tell the tale of the thwarted lovers and their sexless passion. At a social event, Montriveau asks for an introduction to the stately Duchess of Langeais, a scion of a highly placed family, who he views across the next room. It is apparent from the outset that the two live in different worlds. The Duchess exists in a society of dances and balls where everything revolves around manners while Montriveau is a soldier who is awkward and unrefined.

She is married but her husband is not seen, allowing Montriveau the opening to court her with stories of his desert escapades. His story becomes extended over several nights as the Duchess fakes illness and disinterest, and his telling of the story becomes only an excuse for their continued meetings. Balibar is mesmerizing as she draws her lover close then pushes him away until their romance becomes little more than a tug of war with intricate battle plans laid on both sides. Although Armand claims to be desperately in love, he is a passive suitor, devoted to satisfying her whims but not his desire. When he finally becomes the pursued rather than the pursuer, the table is set for emotional distress and increased psychological warfare. In the film's most dramatic moment, Montriveau stages a kidnapping that is intended to impress Antoinette with his intractable frustration but comes off merely as a means of convincing himself.

Rivette is a careful observer as he watches the two warriors thrust and parry, offering a view of love as a tool of power. The tension is played out for such a long time that irritation and boredom eventually sets in but is held in check by the film's elegance and delicate physical beauty. With a feeling of unreality, the floorboards creak as the characters pass over them, lost in their own world, engaged in their rituals as if sleepwalking through a museum. Like a stately painting, The Duchess of Langeais is more to be admired than loved and I was rarely moved, yet days later I find that the film's strange, sad, haunting quality has returned over and over to memory like a sly obsession that has insinuated itself into my mind and refuses to let go.