Ne Touchez Pas La Hache

Jacques Rivette - 2007
Rivette's camera takes in long tracks, moving in, free, autonomous, from far away to meet the action, and frame it in sometimes long shots, sometimes a bit closer, nearly always pretty long takes with this swooping camera.
An incredibly elliptical narrative, almost jump cuts. A Bressonian sense of an action being carried out, pushing the plot along with that look, that piece of dialogue. Pure plot, yet the ellipsis goes over much of what we would often see; pure narrative, except it is not quite a narrative, we have to piece it together.
The idea of cinema as narrative seems key here. Psychology is better represented by the novel, which is why we have the jumps to the white on black intertitles, still a shocking move. Film for narrative, for showing ettiquette (for showing more; it's just better, now, seems to be the reason this is a film with a bit of novel, not vice versa), for eyeline matches, for modern life, better than the novelist Balzac. The novel for psychological stuff; why not just tell us these things? And music enters too, in between. This is all a slightly reductive reading, but seems there.
The text and the play acting is also a key theme in the narrative. The man controls the text, wants to tell a story, make her a story, dominate her that way. She is a control freak, an idealist, who won't let him narrate, who wants to create her own mis-en-scene. This is an element to the constant play, back and forth, of domination between them. Rivette's world is that of intrigues, looks, all created despite the fact there are barely more than two characters here, and barely more than two or three rooms. These locations are what they are, but they are also entirely society; monadology.