this film punishes the senses deliberately, subjecting its audience to a ripping gauntlet of painful visual and aural textures. our eyeballs are lacerated by the relentlessly jumpy hand-held camera, pans too swift to apprehend without nausea, and the barrage of disorientingly abrupt jump cuts. ears attacked by the harsh banausic soundtrack, pounded by soulless machinery, everything torturously intrusive and overloud, even tap water, where even sitar and tabla are twisted into instruments of pain.
jacquot's apparent rationale for this mortification of our senses is to replicate the pains of a journey of spiritual self-discovery, whose immemorial signposts feature suffering, danger, and abnegation. traditional pilgrims crippled themselves crawling to shrines on their knees. jacquot's pilgrim is a young woman, Jeanne, brought up by her single mother, never feeling at home in society or in her skin, who learns around her 18th birthday that she was conceived in Benares of an Indian father, and compulsively undertakes a voyage seeking him, her roots, herself, a voyage that she insists on financing by painful humiliation.
Isild le Besco, portraying Jeanne, provides a pitch-perfect, nail-on-chalkboard personification of the skin-shredding pilgrim. Using her acting skills and flesh mercilessly, le Besco forces us to internalize the gnawing estrangement, rage, and bafflement that eat at Jeanne like a cancer. The audience is never at ease looking at Jeanne, even when she is getting a massage. Her vulnerability is unendurable, verging always on the razor edge of victimization and violation. le Besco appears to have fattened up her body for this role, especially her hips, which works very well for it, bringing her character to the far edge of voluptuousness, on the point of losing it.
At a Lincoln Center Q&A, Jacquot emphasized repeatedly how crucial it is for a director not to be cognizant of what he is doing. For all his genuine charm, he seemed tormented by hyper-rationality, determined to rid himself of this daemon. The Untouchable, with all its scourging of the senses, seems like his desperate attempt to purge himself of it, like burning away the flesh of corpses in Benares. But doesn't that deliver the film as a triumph of just the kind of rationality that he made it to escape?
For me Jacquot's rip-tide--reason trying to trick away reason by mortifying the senses--made The Untouchable a film that i found almost too painful to watch. The theory was enjoyable to contemplate--as were moments of beauty and mystery--but his programmatic bloodying of my poor eyes and ears gave me a headache so bad that I had to fight to keep from vomiting. Nonetheless, I can't help admiring the good work, thoughtfulness, and courage (to create something so rebarbative) that went into it's creation. Would that Jacquot had trusted those moments of beauty and mystery, allowed them to take off free of the visual and aural punishment, lifted the veil of supplices.
