DON’T TOUCH THE AXE (Jacques Rivette, 2007)

“The Duchess of Langeais is my mistress!”
     Armand, the Marquis of Montriveau, is being premature when he announces this in solitude to whatever is keeping score. Indeed, he will never have Antoinette, who is married, and whose future cloistered marriage will be with Jesus Christ. Beginning in 1823, Armand is obsessed; for him, the consummation of the affair might provide an antidote to his battlefield experience. He is a national hero; he needs to be at peace and feel he is a man.
     Drawn from Honoré de Balzac’s 1834 novella La duchesse de Langeais, Jacques Rivette’s Ne touchez pas la hache is careful, deliberate, poised and elegant; form expresses content as the film itself constantly seems anticipatory of consummation. Be forewarned: This will drive some people nuts. However, Rivette, at 80, knows what he is doing. Every bit of his remarkably patient and cumulative film exudes the redress for war, for national service, that Armand psychically and emotionally requires—all that he will not get. Rivette’s most recent film—he is at work on another—will be (except historically) irrelevant when war is obsolete.
     The film’s signature is unmistakable but perhaps surprising. Throughout, we do not think “Rivette”; we think, “Rohmer,” Rivette’s elder, and long-ago fellow cinéaste and critic. It is their friendship that brought Rivette to Bazin’s Cahiers du cinéma, the legendary (and still existant) film journal. What makes Rivette’s film so personal is its sense of his never having adequately discharged the debt he feels he owes to Eric Rohmer. Rivette, one might say, has never consummated the expression of gratitude he feels. That is what this film is meant to do.
     Both Rohmer and Rivette were part of the nouvelle vague, cinema’s most important movement ever. Rohmer never seemed a perfect fit, perhaps because of the Roman Catholic determinism permeating his films. I wonder: Is Ne touchez pas la hache, on one level, Rivette’s apology for La religieuse (1966)—not to God, not to the Church, but to Eric Rohmer?

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COMPANY LIMITED (Satyajit Ray, 1971)

The middle part of Satyajit Ray’s “Calcutta trilogy,” based on Manisankar “Sankar” Mukherjee’s novel, Seemabaddha begins brilliantly, in a pre-credit passage with a documentary air, as protagonist Shyamalendu Chatterjee’s voiceover introduces both himself, a student of the humanities who once worked as an English teacher, and the company for which he now works as marketing manager. This firm, which is British, manufactures electric fans (a luxury item primarily aimed at a global market); ambitious, Shyamal aims for a room at the top. His devolution, presumably in pursuit of money and power, is elusively suggested by the self-objectification inherent in this “packaged” introduction. Thereafter, Shyamal sinks deeper and deeper into a competitive and manipulative corporate mentality. In order to cover up a faulty export order and hold onto his executive position, and advance from there, Shyamal does something which disgusts Ray’s social conscience: conspiring with a corrupt labor official, he manipulates a workers’ strike, lockout and riot, which makes him look good when he quells it.
     At the same time, Shyamal’s growing inhumanity is conveyed by the state of his marriage. Shyamal keeps wife Dolan in the dark as to his increasingly depraved nature, which he reveals instead—it is a form of infidelity—to his wife’s sister, Tutul (Sharmila Tagore, Apu’s bride in Ray’s Apu Sansar, 1959—and wonderful again), whose once envy of her sister’s marriage now stands corrected.
     For me, this is among Ray’s least interesting films, but his distancing strategies are perfectly correlative to the wider and wider distance that Shyamal sets between his “new” self and his former humanity. Score this as a bull’s-eye: in a black-and-white movie, the artificial colors of a filmed commercial advertisement—for Ray, a degenerate use of film.
     Winner of the International Critics’ Prize at Venice.