Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) - film review

General Armand de Montriveau arrives on a Spanish island as part of a French expedition to re-establish the rule of Ferdinand VII.   There, in a monastery, he discovers Sister Thérèse, the woman he has been desperately seeking for five years...  The story began in Paris, what seems like a lifetime ago.  The moment he saw Antoinette de Navarreins for the first time, Armand de Montriveau knew that she was the woman of his life.  But she is a coquette and a schemer, renowned for toying with the affections of men.   Besides, she is already married, to the Duke of Langeais.   Yet it pleases her to let the gallant general court her, knowing as she does that he will never have her heart...

There is a cold mortuary feel to this sombre portrayal of an impossible love affair involving a coquettish noblewoman and a soldier set in the early part of the Nineteenth Century.  Ne touchez pas la hache is closely based on Honoré de Balzac’s novel La Duchesse de Langeais, which was in turn inspired by the writer’s own painful amorous experiences with the Duchesse de Castries.   In one of his bleakest films to date, director Jacques Rivette succeeds not only in relating Balzac’s tragic love story with exquisite poignancy and elegance, but he also captures something of the author’s style, particularly the unremitting sense of oppression that stems from the harsh societal constraints of the period.  William Lubtchansky’s cinematography lends the film a claustrophobic feel and austerity that emphasises the hopelessness of the predicament in which the lead characters find themselves. 

Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu are superb as the star-crossed lovers in what is pretty well a two-handed theatrical piece.  The understated yet intensely focused performances of both actors cannot help but draw the spectator into their world, a world that is darkened, not brightened, by a passion that fails to ignite.  The apparent coldness with which Balibar’s character treats Depardieu’s can barely conceal her true feelings, but by the time she realises the truth of her own sentiment, the damage has already been done.  Thwarted by the protagonists’ own tragic failings and by a hypocritical society that looks askance at illicit liaisons in the nobility, this fragile love can only wither and die before our eyes.  In what is surely his darkest and most pessimistic film to date, Jacques Rivette seems to take a sadistic pleasure in showing just how cruel and destructive that fatal attraction can be.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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Don’t touch the axe!  If you do it, you shall feel the keen blade of Rivette’s mise- en-scène, which slowly slices the standard rhythm of most movies.  Delay is a characteristic of Rivette’s films, especially here, where the passage of time is decisive.  The passion of both lovers is gradually increased and subdued to an interior duel, and doesn’t spare the rage and impulses of those accustomed to the fancies of seduction bordering sadism within the hypocritical high society of the French Restoration.  Scenery, costumes, candles and shadows, and subtle care for details, add visual force to this adaptation of Balzac’s La duchesse de Langeais, which ends with an account of a mysterious but useless rescue, and a comment that falls upon the spectator like a cold and pitiless axe.
Adam Gai (Israel)

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