Jacques Rivette

Returning, Departing: Ne touchez pas la hache and 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup

which he claims “is necessarily fascination and rape, that is how it acts on people; it is something pretty unclear, something one sees shrouded in darkness, where you project the same things as in dreams: that is where the cliché becomes true” (qtd. in Aumont et al. 37). In the fashion of solar Celtic goddesses Grainne and Iseult, Marie is destined to share the future with her lover in passionate, unending cyclical love, a feminine destiny that is celebrated in the recommencement of the 1970s cycle. From this perspective, Blossom Dearie’s upbeat rendition of “Our Day Will Come” at the close of Histoire de Marie et Julien offers a final flash of hope, a resonant melodic line that celebrates feminine possibility. Cyclical endings are recurrent in Rivette’s work. Within the final exchange of glances between Marie and Julien, which retrospectively resituates the film’s oneiric opening within a feminine perspective, Rivette returns to the perennial theme that inflects all his films: time. Similar to the clocksmith’s desire in Histoire de Marie et Julien to repair the works that line the rooms of his house, the director Rivette seeks to repair time through patience, persistence, and passion for his craft. Clockworks that clutter the film’s mise-en-scène point to the director’s ongoing obsession —a director who now is no longer young and who acutely senses the preciosity of time remaining to complete those projects destined to otherwise remain unfinished. Not unlike the clocksmith whose mastery is measured in the practical, affective relationship he maintains with an artisanal, manual trade, Rivette merits the title of “patron” (boss), the term that Rivette had formulated while filming Jean Renoir le patron to describe the stature of the director within the profession. Returning, Departing: Ne touchez pas la hache and 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup Rivette returns to the historical costume drama in his largely faithful adaptation of the second novella, La duchesse de Langeais (between Ferragus and La fille aux yeux d’or), of Balzac’s nineteenth-century trilogy, Histoire des treize (The Thirteen). As we recall, the prologue of The Thirteen had provided the impetus for the ambling, improvisational serial film Noli me tangere decades earlier. In this recent adaptation that strives to remain faithful not only to the spirit but to the letter of the text, Rivette returns to the novella’s original title, Ne touchez pas la hache The Films of Jacques Rivette | 127 (Don’t Touch the Axe; 2007), and to the tableau, revisiting the themes of desire and possession that, to a greater or lesser degree, inspire all his adaptations. As critics have noted, Rivette’s theatrical structuring is very much in evidence in the film’s prologue, when we first encounter Sister Thérèse, formerly known as the Duchess Antoinette of Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) (Naremore, 31; Romney, 67; Thirion, 10). Her dramatic appearance from behind a closed curtain where she is cloistered behind the grille of a Carmelite nunnery recalls the encrypted theatrical tableaux at the commencement of La religieuse. The intensity of this moment is elevated here because of two previous scenes in the Carmelite chapel that define the Duchess as the lost love of General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a celebrated French military officer who has been desperately searching for her for the past five years. His search ends where the film begins, at an organ recital in a chapel on the island of Mallorca, where he recognizes the melancholic strains of “River Tage” (lyrics by J. H. Demeun and music by B. Pollet), a ballad that he continues to associate with his former lover, the Duchess, and their ill-fated romance in Paris. Framed in a flashback, the film’s central story begins five years earlier in Restoration Paris. A heavy brocade curtain is drawn to reveal a dimly Figure 14. A tableau: General de Montriveau discovers Antoinette in a Carmelite nunnery in Ne touchez pas la hache. 128 | Jacques Rivette lit drawing room in the fashionable neighborhood of Saint-Germain. Returning to the structure of his earlier Balzac adaptation, La belle noiseuse, Rivette conceptualizes the structure of La hache as a series of brilliantly choreographed tableaux that create the impression of a classical five-act play comprised of three key central acts—the Duchess’s theatrically orchestrated seduction and humiliation of the General in her boudoir, the General’s vengeance on the...