An Artist’s Brush With the Truth

When we think about art these days, if we think about it at all, it’s usually in terms of market value or morality, of who paid how much or what offends whose sensibilities. We have forgotten what the prehistoric artists who painted the walls of caves knew absolutely: that the making of a piece of art can be a dangerous, powerful, passionate process, an act of magic undertaken at the greatest risk to all involved.

It is one of the many pleasures of Jacques Rivette’s involving “La Belle Noiseuse” (at the Nuart) that it not only reminds us how intoxicating the artistic process can be but also allows us to share in the resulting upheaval. Very much a film that takes its time (at a length of four hours, how could it be otherwise?), “Noiseuse” reaps the benefits of its unhurried style, presenting a detailed examination of the push-pull relationship between artist and model that ultimately becomes as involving as any potboiler.

Given that this film was directed and co-scripted (with Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent) by Rivette, the four hours is no surprise. One of the founders of the French New Wave and a director for 30 years, Rivette has frequently made films at lengths (ranging all the way up to 12 hours and 40 minutes) that have put a rather serious crimp in their accessibility.

With “Noiseuse,” however, that has not proved to be the case, as the film was a popular selection for the Grand Prix at Cannes last spring and played successfully at the New York Film Festival. Rivette has not only come up with a subject that can support a long film, but in Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Beart found the performers who have the skills to carry it off.

Piccoli plays Frenhofer, an artist considered a genius who nevertheless hasn’t touched a brush in 10 years, preferring to live the brooding life of an aristocrat in exile with his wife and former model Liz (Jane Birkin) in a chateau in the South of France. Into his voluntary isolation comes Nicolas, a young artist intent on paying his respects, and his stunning girlfriend Marianne (Beart).

Though the visit was engineered by a mutual friend, initially Frenhofer seems not to be taken with it. A kind of toothless old bear who still knows how to growl, he grudgingly displays his work and mentions his last project, inspired by a 17th-Century courtesan and called the “La Belle Noiseuse” (roughly translatable as the beautiful irritant or troublemaker), which he began with Liz and has never finished. Impulsively, Nicolas volunteers Marianne as a model and equally impulsively, and with more than a touch of irritation, she agrees.

It is at this point, an hour and a half into things, when most films are beginning to wind down, that an unclothed Marianne and an uncertain Frenhofer closet themselves in his studio and “La Belle Noiseuse” really kicks into gear. Surprisingly, it is not the nudity that holds our attention, but rather the creative process itself, shown from two complementary and equally involving perspectives.

The first is the very basic, almost documentary pleasure of watching art being made. Not merely hinted at, as movies usually do, but actually created before our eyes. Because one of the things Rivette does with all his time is show us in detail, using the hands of French artist Bernard Dufour, how the lines come to be drawn and the aesthetic choices to be made. Working first in pen and ink, then charcoal, finally with paint itself. Frenhofer/Dufour creates a body of work on Marianne that cannot help but fascinate us as we watch it take shape.

Taking shape at the same time is the obsessive/symbiotic relationship between the artist and his model. Though Frenhofer starts out enervated and preoccupied, the work energizes and intoxicates him as it simultaneously exhausts but totally overwhelms her. They become totally mutually involved, not in any remotely romantic sense, but in the process of creation.

“You’re not free and neither am I,” he tells Marianne as he puts her through a series of backbreaking poses, adding later that it’s not he who wants to torture her like this, it is the painting. This very traditional idea (not surprisingly, the film is loosely based on a Balzac novel) of the artist seeking absolute truth in his work at any cost is at the heart of what Rivette is doing here, and the question of whether Frenhofer succeeds or not and the cost merely searching extracts from not only Marianne but also those even peripherally involved, like Nicholas and Liz, is the director’s central dramatic theme.

As with Frenhofer and Marianne, both Piccoli and Beart have very different challenges facing them and both handle them with elan. Beart, best known for her starring role in “Manon of the Spring,” manages not only to be convincingly self-possessed while acting completely nude, but also to project the fiery spirit that both makes Marianne agree to the challenge and inspires a burn-out case like Frenhofer.

As that exhausted but triumphant artist, Piccoli faced an equally difficult assignment. Working almost exclusively with facial expressions and body language, he manages to capture the intensity of the artistic quest, to make visible the excitement of a process that by definition is almost entirely interior. A veteran of more than 100 features, Piccoli makes use of all his accumulated skill here, and the pleasure of “La Belle Noiseuse” is not only seeing him employ it, but seeing a film that is challenging enough to make him have to.

‘La Belle Noiseuse’ Michel Piccoli: Frenhofer Jane Birkin: Liz Emmanuelle Beart: Marianne Marianne Denicourt: Julienne David Bursztein: Nicolas Gilles Arbona: Porbus

A FR3 Films Production and George Reinhart Production, released by MK2 Productions USA. Director Jacques Rivette. Producer Pierre Grise. Screenplay by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette. Cinematographer William Lubtchansky. Editor Nicole Lubtchansky. Costumes Laurence Struz. Production design Manu de Chauvigny. Sound Florion Eidenbenz. Running time: 4 hours.