Ne touchez pas la hache
Jacques Rivette
General Armand de Montriveau organises an expedition to a Spanish island where he finds a Carmelite convent. He discovers French nun Sister Theresa there. Introducing himself as a fighter for Catholicism, he manages to gain an audience with the women he thinks to be Antoinette, Duchess of Langeais. This short meeting totally disrupts the lives of two former lovers...
With : Guillaume Depardieu, Jeanne Balibar, Bulle Ogier, Michel Piccoli
Screenplay : Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent (d'après le roman La Duchesse de Langeais de Honoré de Balzac)
Image : William Lubtchansky
Sound : Florian Eidenbenz
Editing : Nicole Lubtchansky
Decors : Manu de Chauvigny
Screenplay : Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent (d'après le roman La Duchesse de Langeais de Honoré de Balzac)
Image : William Lubtchansky
Sound : Florian Eidenbenz
Editing : Nicole Lubtchansky
Decors : Manu de Chauvigny
Production : Pierre Grise Productions, Cinemaundici, Arte France
Distribution: Les Films du Losange
Distribution: Les Films du Losange
In 1991, Jacques Rivette adapted Honoré de Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) as La Belle Noiseuse. La Duchesse de Langeais (The Duchess of Langeais) is one of the three novels in The Thirteen in which Balzac shows his taste for secret societies, also dear to Rivette. To transpose the novel Rivette wanted the directing to mirror Balzac's style, "with long sentences cut by events, unexpected changes of pace, his way of saying important things just in passing". From ellipses to sudden jerks forward, narrative silences to psychological mysteries, Ne touchez pas la hache (The Duchess of Langeais) proves to be more "compression, like César does", in the terms of its author, than a simple literary adaptation.