Toronto. The Duchess of Langeais.

"So it has finally come to this, Jacques Rivette adapting a Balzac novel about the Thirteen, the mysterious group of do-gooding conspirators that a May '68 cabal tried and failed to emulate in the imagined pre-history of Rivette's magnum opus Out 1 and whose existence would obsesses Jean-Pierre Léaud's character in that film as representative of a secret, hidden order behind things," writes Daniel Kasman. "In contrast to that film's sprawling ambitions and literal evocation of the conspiracy, Don't Touch the Axe [Ne touchez pas la hache, also appearing in Toronto as The Duchess of Langeais] seems downright quaint and cozy, a chambered period piece about the sexless courtship between the Duchess Antoinette de Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) and General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), the latter of who is a member of the secret cabal in Balzac's book but whose association is not uttered in the film." And his verdict: B+.

Updated through 9/23.

"One of the best films I saw at Toronto - which showed in Berlin and is inexplicably missing from New York - is Jacques Rivette's eccentric romance," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The tilt of the duchess's head suggests a thousand and one nightly intrigues; the ravaged contours of the general's face invoke other, more distant torments, while Mr Rivette's direction affirms that he remains at the height of his artistic powers."

"I found Rivette's film a masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony, an assured tragicomedy of manners and more," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Rivette's camera is as sure and engrossing as it's ever been, and Depardieu and Balibar give deeply palpable performances."

"[T]he film is constructed as a dazzling array of dances, literal and figurative, in which the man and woman conduct an elaborate pas de deux of flirtation, gamesmanship and erotic possession," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "Rivette's lighting and camerawork is typically severe and exquisite; the storytelling is also hypnotic, using interpolated material from the novel in the form of intertitles that function as literary jump cuts, exploding time and space."

Update, 9/23: "[T]he film is a perfectly timed and highly nuanced evocation of Balzac's romantic tragedy cum secret society thriller rumination on the sexes; why it has received negative reviews elsewhere is beyond me," writes Doug Cummings. "The adaptation itself virtually transcribes Balzac's prose paragraph by paragraph, taking great care to accentuate the author's attention to physical detail, 19th century social mores, and shifting emotional registers.... It may not showcase the experimental Rivette we all know and love, but that merely accentuates the diversity of his talent."

"[T]his was the film that baffled me the most out of all of the films that I saw at TIFF," writes Jesse Ataide at DVD Verdict. "Not because it's a difficult or extremely complex film, but because I was completely at a loss as to why I liked it so much. But some time for reflection and a really insightful article in the last issue of Film Comment (currently is not available online) helped me to realize that a large part of what makes Rivette's film so fascinating is how he dissects and depicts the mechanics of performance and theatricality, but instead of bracketing it in the form of the theater-within-a-film that define much of his most famous work, he strips away the framing device and lets the 'play' perform as the film itself."

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2007 6:03 AM