Issue 1: Summer 2008
BETWEEN THE SALON AND THE CONVENT: Losing Face & Gaining Faith in Jacques Rivette's 'Don't Touch the Axe'
Tony McKibben
Is deep love not often simply shallow love trapped, given no exit or release? In Jacques Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe (Ne touchez pas la hache, 2007) the two leading characters play musical chairs with each other's emotions as they catch themselves in a very formal, very deliberate love affair. Undeniably there are formal elements greater than their own machinations - chiefly that the object of crippled soldier Armand's love, Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, is married to another. But this marriage neither seems to stop her flirting in the early stages of the film, nor humiliating herself later after it seems Armand has lost interest. The characters' own thoughts seem equally as limited as the social rules: as though the social rules merely allow for a certain conventionality of mind to become apparent. In Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World, the writer offers a chapter called ‘The Twilight of Passionate Love', where he addresses love's darkness, an "impossible love that left in men's hearts an unforgettable cautery, a truly devouring ardour, a thirst which death alone could quench..." Societally formal rules here seem to give way to a broader ethos of Eros: "The passion of the Perfect called for a divinizing death. The thirst which it put into men's hearts when they were without faith, but had been overwhelmed by the fiery poetry, drove them to seek in death no more than the supreme thrill." Is this really what Armand de Montriveau and Antoinette seek rather than a conventional till death do us part? If Montriveau were to seek simply the love of a married woman, where would the transcendence reside, taking into account De Rougemont's further claims: the surpassing of oneself "is no more than an exaltation of narcissism. It is intended to achieve not liberation from the senses, but a painful intensity of sentiment. Intoxication by the spirit"? As Antoinette ends up in a convent, and as Armand tries desperately to spring her from her island retreat, are they both intoxicated by the spirit?
In much of director Jacques Rivette's work the question of love's possibility and impossibility has been explored, whether that be the impossible romance of the couple in Hurlevant (1985), based on Wuthering Heights, the romance between man and revenant in Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003), or the tentative denied affairs in Va savoir (2001), and he has been a fascinating commentator on other film relationships: for example on Rossellini's Stromboli (1949) and Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Of Stromboli, Rivette says in an open letter to the director, "do you now understand what that freedom is: the freedom of the ardent soul, cradled by providence and grace which, never abandoning it to its tribulations, save it from perils and errors and make each trial redound to its glory..." Speaking of Hiroshima mon amour Rivette says "...the Emmanuelle Riva character is that of a woman who is not irrational, but is not-rational. She doesn't understand herself. She doesn't analyse herself. Anyway, it is a bit like what Rossellini tried to do in Stromboli..."
But is it? Stromboli suggests spirituality and love consistent with de Rougemont's proposition. But surely Hiroshima mon amour is a decidedly secular film, a film that looks at the ethical layers involved in the evolving relationship between Riva and her Japanese lover. In Don't Touch the Axe much of the tension of desire resides less in the societal demands placed on the characters than the perversity with which the characters work with societal expectation, their own feelings, and the feelings of the other, to reach the ‘transcendent'. This is in some ways a variation on Stromboli's ardent soul, but the film possesses an underlying satiric edge in its presentation of the tragic.
Thus the characters' behaviour would not in contemporary terms be quite the same as complexity, and Riva's character in Hiroshima mon amour would seem to be infinitely more textured than Jeanne Balibar's character here. But there is complexity that comes from the psychological depths, and complexity that comes from, if you like, un-depth. For example there is no sense in Resnais' film that Riva is playing a game with her Japanese lover: the new lover carries a genuine depth charge in the way he reverberates and sends her back to the end of the war and her great lost love. In Don't Touch the Axe the Duchess flightily plays with Montriveau in the film's first two thirds and then, after he kidnaps her, threatens to brand her, but then releases her and refuses to get in touch, she becomes besotted. They both seem to want from each other a love that pushes them into the further reaches of the metaphysical, that can move them from the mundane limitations of the social, to the exquisite demands of the transcendent. When Rivette insists "what happens between the Duchess and General Armand de Montriveau illustrates the errors in the ways of a tiny clan from the Saint Germain neighbourhood in Paris at a particular time..." it is true that the story's tragedy resides in the rules and regulations of the era, but this is hardly Romeo and Juliet. It is an impossible romance not least because of the impossibility that resides within the two characters.
One uses the word impossibility rather than complexity, however. A complex character would be the type of figure whom Kierkegaard understands so well when he talks of the Shadowgraph. Contrasting immediate sorrow and reflective sorrow, Kierkegaard says "immediate sorrow is that immediate copy and expression of the sorrow's impression which is entirely congruent with the original". "Reflective sorrow cannot...be an object of representation in art, because it never subsists but is always in the process of becoming, partly because it is unconcerned with and indifferent to the external, the visible," a variation perhaps of Shakespeare's belief that there is no art to find the mind's construction in the face.
A Shadowgraph, then, is one "whose soul conceals an emigrant who has withdrawn from the outside world to watch over a hidden treasure". If Hiroshima mon amour is so fundamentally significant a film, this significance resides in Resnais' capacity to move towards representing that reflective sorrow in film. Rivette wants something else, a problematic closer to de Rougemont's, where the issue isn't hidden depths, but the strategic aspect of power that gives way to the transcendent but bypasses, perhaps, the more immediately metaphysical. In a passage in his book Seduction, Jean Baudrillard says that "if seduction is a passion or destiny, it is usually the opposite passion that prevails - that of not being seduced." Who will not be seduced might be the question, and Rivette's film predicates the shallowness in the first encounter between Montriveau and the Duchess.
Shortly before their introduction, Antoinette says he "went to the centre of Africa." A friend continues "held prisoner for two years by savages, before fleeing. Makes an interesting man of him." It is as if the horrors of Africa serve as no more than a precursor to having something interesting to say about oneself in the salons of Paris, where seduction can take place. Montriveau may be a complex man, but his complexities are here flattened out for the purpose of being forced into conventionally seductive behaviour. Yet this is a conventionality Montriveau is never quite likely to achieve. Played by Guillaume Depardieu, the film seems to capture its deliberately stilted rhythm from the actor's demeanour. Having lost a leg several years ago, Depardieu isn't going to be easy casting in an art form that assumes able-bodiedness as a given. But Rivette cast Depardieu (and Balibar) in advance of the writing: "We broke with usual practise by not looking for actors to play the leads, but by writing a project for Jeanne and Guillaume, for which we didn't yet have funding." As Montriveau goes over to talk to Antoinette, Rivette stays close to Depardieu as he walks across to her, and the film seems much more in cinematic sympathy with Montriveau than salon culture. This is not a visually sweeping take but rather a stumbling, hesitant and awkward exploration of the salon's limitations: the limitations of self-expressivity in an environment that demands smoothness and social convention.
But can we claim that out of the cultural shallowness deep love comes, or at least the spiritual possibilities invoked by de Rougemont? If for example there is little room to create the amplified possibilities available to the contemporary characters in Va savoir, then will a character find the only available emotional portal? If there is the game on the one hand and absolute humiliation on the other, is it no wonder that a character will move from the coy gesture to absolute despair with such rapidity if there is chiefly society on the one hand and God on the other? For is that not exactly what we see Antoinette doing here: after it looks as if Montriveau wants nothing more to do with her, she retreats to a convent.
If there is something perfunctory about Rivette's film, something emotionally inevitable about its narrative trajectory, it lies not least in the lack of options available to its characters, and most especially Balibar's. This is not at all to say it is a lesser film than Va savoir, and some might claim that the very options available to the characters in the earlier film leaves the tone much lighter and consequently makes the film less ‘meaningful' than the new one. But instead we need only think of the way the optional paucity returns us to our original point: the trapped-ness of love that leads to an almost inevitable need for transcendence.
After Montriveau, frustrated by her caprices, kidnaps Antoinette and then lets her go, the Duchess writes letter after letter to Montriveau to which he doesn't reply - indeed, as we find out later, he doesn't even open them. As he said, after choosing not to brand her, "I have lost faith". Yet this is the moment that Antoinette seems to have found hers, and thereafter becomes obsessed with Montriveau until she decides to enter a convent and tries to become instead obsessed with God. There is a perfunctory logic to Rivette's film, as if faith in another or faith in God are really the only available options, and that the characters work themselves up into a frenzy of belief in the Other or, failing that, religious conversion.
Rivette is not, it would seem, a religious filmmaker but he is often of course a mysterious one. Frequently his films revolve around mysteries greater than their containment by plot, and whether it be Paris Belongs to Us (Paris nous apartient, 1960), Celine and Julie Go Boating (Celine et Julie vont en bateau, 1974) or Pont du Nord (1981) mystery is often the collision of subjectivity with an objective city full of unfulfilled potential, in what Deleuze calls Rivette's ‘investigation-outings'. Jonathan Romney refers to the new film, in a recent essay in Film Comment, as "an essay on courtship as theatre, and eventually theatre as cruelty", and there is a hemmed in quality to the film that even the opening and closing sections set on a Spanish island cannot open up. There is a sense that these are characters finally trapped by their own and society's limitation. Montriveau's obsession with Antoinette and Antoinette's determined faith in God leave little airiness.
Rivette offers the odd sly aside on the soundtrack (the sounds of seagulls in Paris), and plays with space when Montriveau, after abducting Antoinette, returns her to a salon by apparently passing merely through a corridor and a few doors. But generally the film shows characters for whom play has almost no place, and yet whom we may feel, for all their seriousness, are still surprisingly ‘shallow'. It is almost as though Rivette is saying the tragedy here doesn't lie in the ostensible drama. It doesn't lie in the idea of a man obsessed with a woman who then becomes obsessed with him and who, after he fails to meet her on the night when she offers him an ultimatum (he misses the appointment because of a stopped clock), disappears into a convent, and then dies just before he tries to spring her from the convent where he has finally managed to track her down. No, the tragedy resides much more in the lack of mystery or texture the characters seem to have generated in their lives. When at the end of the film Marc Barbé's character says to the grieving Depardieu: "don't think of it but as a book, read in your childhood" Montriveau replies "Yes, it is but a poem", while the camera pans away from the boat they're on to the sea and the sky in the closing shot of the film.
This is a strangely indeterminate tragi-farce, a comedy of errors without comedy, as though Rivette wanted to tell a story of limited options and neither to take the story too seriously or too lightly. To take it too seriously would have lent it a weight that might have justified it as a tragedy on its own terms, to take it too lightly would have been to give the contemporary viewer hindsight that is no more deserving. For the question remains, if couched in a different form today: how do we give our emotional and imaginative life freedom? Perhaps today the options are secular but are they, generally, equally banal?
To read more on the films of Jacques Rivette:
Tony McKibbin is an independent writer and teacher who writes for The List in Edinburgh and various film and literary journals worldwide.