Highly Overrated But Still Good

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Okay, I'll admit it. I've only seen a couple of Jacques Rivette's films apart from this one (Celine & Julie Go Boating & Le Belle Noisettes). I had heard prior to seeing those that Rivette was always one to make it difficult for audiences (timing being one:a standard Rivette film clocks in no less than two and a half hours). 'Ne Touchez Pas La Hache' is a beautifully filmed exercise cinematic narcolepsy. The characters seem to sleepwalk their way throughout this film. A few of the other cinephiles in attendance seemed to get their jollies from this film. To each their own, I say. I guess I should see some more of Rivette's work before I toss in the towel on him (I still prefer Trufaut,or even Goddard,among the French "new wave" directors).

So I went back into a book I was reading a few weeks ago, The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road, finding this perfect quote from the editors describing the illumination of the space between Pascal (19th Century) and Freud (20th) which the movie by Jacques Rivette that I saw tonight so monumentally demonstrated (and which is so fundamental to what I am experiencing myslef): "If, in the century in which Freud's own life began, it was still necessary to secure a stronghold as Pascal's Wager thus had to be transformed, honed into the sharpest superegoic injunction imaginable - "believe" - as the only apparent means to this end; if thus it was still apparently necessary to submit to the Father at every instant, to remain standing awake all night to assure one's salvation - if this is the way the post-Copernican theologians would have it, Freud, nonetheless, and lucky for us, offers a new turn, something quite different, in the necessity of thought and practice." Yup. As powerful a film as I've seen in ages. Those who hate it loathe the cinema. Luckily for them it is dying.

I walked out. My date fell asleep. Badly acted, badly directed and I can't figure out how this got made. Who would fund such crap? I realize that this is a style of movie-making but it's a really bad style. No music, not transitional shots. Do we need text telling us that the next scene is "the following day"? My guess would be if the two are meeting tomorrow and he's wearing a different outfit that it indeed is THE FOLLOWING DAY! I really can't imagine what the vision of this movie was. I saw the good reviews on the poster and thought well, it must be good otherwise why would it be distributed in this country and playing at a theater that books great films? Boy was I duped. Run, do not walk, away from this one.

Jacques Rivette is strongly associated with the infamous New Wavelet which tried its level best via meaningless tracking shots, hand-held cameras, jump cuts and an almost pathological hatred for anything shot in a Studio by professional technicians and/or adapted from a Literary source to bring the French Cinema to its knees.In the fullness of time most of the mavericks - with Godard a notable exception - put their toys back in the pram and turned to kissing rather than biting the hand that fed them, witness Truffaut's Le Dernier Metro, for example. It's difficult to find something less New Wavelet than Honore Balzac yet here he is, aristocrats, society balls and all and finding his name juxtaposed with that of Rivette.Rivette, of course, is not known for dashing off a story in 90 minutes when he can take four hours and here he splits the difference bringing it in at two hours fifteen although it FEELS like watching the Entire Human Comedy without the laughs. Ironically Rivette resorts to punctuating his movie with title cards that read 'one hour later' or, even better 'a short time later' when you could have sworn it was more like three decades since the opening credits. There is absolutely no chemistry at all between Jeanne Balibar (who was so good in Rivette's Va Savoir) and Guillaume Depardieu who appears seriously fossilized throughout. The Academics/pseuds are gonna LOVE this one.