La Belle Noiseuse (1991) – Jacques Rivette

“We want the truth in painting. It’s cruel.”

Freely adapted from the same Balzac short story that, according to art world apocrypha, inspired Picasso to paint his masterpiece Guernica, La Belle Noiseuse is a deliberate examination of the artist and his process.

Young artist Nicolas (David Bursztein) visits the villa of aging master Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) and unilaterally offers the aid of his partner Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) as a model for the reclusive painter’s unfinished masterwork. Marianne, dismayed that this offer was made without her consent, rightly divines that the best way of getting back at her lover is by determinedly going through with the deal. Nicolas soon regrets his decision but finds himself with no recourse.

The couple’s personal travails are not the focus of this film, though, and once Marianne enters the old man’s atelier, it is the creation of the eponymous portrait that takes center stage. Rivette dedicates a substantial portion of the four-hour running time to exhibiting the artistic act; Frenhofer produces sketches and ink drawings from conception to completion before our very eyes, via the hand and sensibilities of real-life French figurist Bernard Dufour. Surprisingly, these sequences are less tedious than absorbing, Dufour’s real-time creation breathing energy into the proceedings and obscuring the line between narrative cinema and documented event, drawing to mind a similar conflation of media in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s more experimental Le Mystère Picasso.

The rapport between Marianne and Frenhofer evolves from coldly distant to playful and back again as Rivette explores the symbiosis between artist and model. Frenhofer insists that the mental and physical pain imposed on Marianne during their sessions is also visited upon him, although whether or not he is telling the truth is uncertain. He also defends her suffering, maintaining that she must be destroyed before he can hope to truly capture her, but this too is questionable.

In fact, much of Frenhofer’s dialogue is so wrapped up in the “artist’s mystique” that it is difficult to accept his explanations as anything but purposefully elliptical B.S. This wouldn’t really be a problem except that one gets the feeling that he is meant to be a surrogate for Rivette, spouting out cryptic truths about the artistic process that the director expects us to swallow unquestioningly. The original Balzac story hints that the Frenhofer character may, in fact, be mad and calls into question his pontifications, a dimension that seems to have been unfortunately stripped away in this adaptation.

At the end of the film, Rivette wisely decides to withhold a glimpse of the completed masterpiece from the audience, showing us only the principal characters reacting to it. This is a shrewd move on his part because, as Marianne tells Frenhofer, the answer is always less interesting than the riddle.

Piccoli gives a strong performance here and the supporting players acquit themselves well, although they seem to spend the majority of their screen time eating modest Provençal breakfasts and navigating stretches of Gallo-Roman architecture. Jane Birkin manages to stand out as Frenhofer’s long-suffering wife and former model, although I was a bit distracted by the fact that she looks so eerily like her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Not really her fault, though, so I forgive her.

~ by cahiersdumovies on August 1, 2008.