European Films

After his 1991 film La belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) French director and erstwhile nouvelle vague member Jacques Rivette again adapts local literary giant Balzac in Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe). The film was part of the recent Berlinale Competition and is based on the novel La duchesse de Langeais (The Duchess of Langeais, also the film's US title), which is part of Balzac’s sprawling La comédie humaine. Rivette, himself known for his sprawling epics (Noiseuse clocked in at four hours, his almost unseen Out 1 at 13), feels completely at home in what is essentially a bare mise-en-scene of Balzac’s verbal jousting between a Napoleonic war hero and a married Restoration temptress. At 137 minutes, this almost feels like a briskly paced Rivette short. It may sound like silly wordplay, but it is nothing short of rivetting.

Jeanne Balibar (the protagonist of Rivette’s Va savoir / Who Knows) is the Duchess of Langeais, who is the star of the sumptuous balls and feats of 1820s Restoration Paris. She is married to a Duke who remains out of sight not only in the film but apparently also in her life. At a party, she is drawn to the exotic stories of dashing general Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a Napoleonic war hero. Despite the fact that each is considered a hero among their peers and each embodies the values that their respective classes exalt, the two are polar opposites. They are of different times, have different backgrounds and should be mutually exclusive.

But as Balzac (and, by extension, Rivette) understand, history knows no clear breaks between one period and the next and it is exactly at these perceived fault lines that the most interesting stories are told. And in this story, it is one of the most shockingly familiar yet utterly compelling clichés that underpins everything (and explains how history glues together one epoch to the next): the fact that opposites attract.

The main struggle between Langeais and Montriveau, who start seeing each other after a flighty introduction, is a romantic one; romantic in both the Gothic and amorous senses of the word. There is no love of the happy-ever-after variety in the air, however, only a passionate kind of electricity that becomes almost as unbearable for the audience as it is for the not-quite-lovers. Langeais and Montriveau act like two extremely well-behaved, well-groomed and infinitely decorous magnets that face each other with their attracting poles bared, only to quickly flip themselves when they get so close together they will have to click. This cat-and-mouse game between the two is created by only two components: Balzac’s words and the actors’ physicality, and Rivette’s mise-en-scene -- theatrical in its long takes and with an emphasis on movement of the characters rather than the camera -- allows for the sheer force of both words and performances to shine through.

Balibar and Depardieu (originally set to co-star in another Rivette project for which funding fell through) are more than up to the task, reuniting verbal and physical fireworks for the strongest show of on-screen passion since two cowboys made out in a tent on Brokeback Mountain (which was also based on a literary work, though there it was the absence of words rather than their presence that took things beyond the boiling point).

Rivette, who co-wrote the screenplay with Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, follows Balzac as closely as Pasolini followed the book of books for his Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew); almost to the letter, filling in minor scenes with words culled from other writings by the nineteenth-century novelist. Michel Piccoli, who also starred in La belle noiseuse, and former Rivette-muse Bulle Ogier co-star in throwaway roles.  

Just how good the two-hour plus showdown between the Duchess and the general is, is illustrated by the fact that Ne touchez pas la hache (which was Balzac’s original, ominous title before the story became part of the Comédie humaine) is bookended by scenes set five years after the encounters between Langeais and Montriveau, when the latter finally finds his object of desire again in an enclosed Majorcan convent. These scenes thus reveal early on that both will survive their fatal-looking games of love and chance, but the intensity of their performances and the sheer force of Balzac’s own words makes you fear for their lives (and their sanity) throughout. Ne touchez pas la hache may not be a thriller in the conventional sense of the word, it certainly is one of the most spine-chilling films of the year. 

This film was screened as part of the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. 

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