Don't Touch The Axe

If the plot of Jacques Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe hinges upon frustration and missed opportunities, then this DVD package seems perfectly designed to exemplify such themes.

All those potentially great extras about the process of adapting Balzac to celluloid, the difficulties of shooting a period piece or Rivette's cinematic history and centrality to the French New Wave, are entirely absent here.

Instead, we get a woefully bland theatrical trailer, and text 'biographies' for Rivette, and his leads Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu – which, adding insult to injury and certainly inspiring frustration in this viewer, turn out not to be biographies at all, but merely selected filmographies. Artificial Eye can do (and often does) much, much better than this.