Ne touchez pas la hache

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.

Honoré De Balzac's novel 'La Duchesse Du Langeais' has been transformed by screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer for the screen as 'Ne Touchez Pas a la Hache' and the result is a mixture of proscenium stage pictures, and scenes separated by written dialog that merely lets the viewer know such unnecessary details such as that fact that time has passed, and well over two hours of an uninvolved courtship between a sensualist and a coquette. While it is a pleasure to remember the times of Balzac and his way with lusty themes, watching this film version can be tedious - at best.

Fans of director Jacques Rivette will find much to enjoy in this adaptation: the pacing of the film feels important to his concept of the development of the story - the stifling boredom of the evenings of balls in Paris and the isolation of the soldiers' lives, deprived of the companionship of lovely ladies. He has cast Jeanne Balibar as the title character Antoinette De Langeais , a married lady of means with a penchant for flirting and coquettish behavior with important men, and Guillaume Depardieu as General Armand De Montriveau, a war hero who lost his leg and returns to Paris vulnerable for love, namely in the instant attraction to Antoinette. The tale is one of a game of the General's passionate love and the duchess' toying with his advances until a climax is reached which changes the approach of each character with rather disastrous consequences for both.

As a period piece the film works well: the costumes and settings are splendid and the scenes in the endless ballrooms are full of grace and lovely music. But the flow of the encounters between Antoinette and Armand are an interminable series of momentary repetitious encounters with a sound track that seems bent on capturing the opening and closing of doors and the loud pacing of the crippled general as he enters and leaves the naughty lady's chamber. There is little to draw us into caring for the characters and after the first hour and a half of the film the courtship begs our indulgence. In French with English subtitles. Definitely recommended for fans of Jacques Rivette's films or Balzac's stories, but a 'long song' for casual viewers. Grady Harp

Jacques Rivette knows how make his feelings bare, then have them mysteriously vanish into dark corners. The same could be said about his characters. The disappearing act takes place when another actor takes over, but the actor who has gone, stays with you; doesn't move but lies in wait.

A modern masterpiece from Rivette which gave me the excitement and awe I experienced when I first encountered Truffaut, Chaplin, Vigo, Renoir, and Becker. For others, it may be Rohmer, Godard, and Rossellini. It will be different for everyone else. I have seen almost all of Rivette's work up unto this point, so by saying this, I don't mean I am experiencing him for the first time. This film just displays that subtle love of film-making I experience when I first saw these filmmakers. The daring moods the film shifts between, carefully holding you tight through the games of passion being battled out between the two main characters.

Its a shame people did not appreciate this; I'm very sorry you didn't. The entire time your minds raced around the desire to hate the pacing of this film, thus the film itself, a great thing of beauty passed by you. You may never see it. I even came across someone who said they had been annoyed by Depardieu's character's wooden leg and found it ridiculous. That is the character and that is also Depardieu. His father's greatness has certainly passed onto him.

To loosely quote Henri Langois: "People are accustomed to crap when they have been fed crap their entire lives. Their throats become coated with it." To the people that have walked out of this film, or the others who have chosen to believe "they know the film's proper length" over the filmmaker's, I'm sorry. But it is an injustice on anyone's part to think they know more about the films of Rivette than Rivette himself.

But to the people out there, the adventurous lovers of the cinema, DO NOT listen to the hostile words surrounding this film. It is splendid. It is another masterstroke in the career of a master like Rivette, and also a blow of justice to the wondrous pages of Balzac.