Time, for most people, has a low return on investment. Four hours spent watching a foreign language film with unfamiliar acteurs et actrices will rarely return a dividend worth flaunting. Nevertheless, because “spending” finds no synonym in “wasting,” I pulled out my time wallet and rained four big ones on La Belle Noiseuse.
The opening credits took just long enough to resolve into the opening scene that I found myself already rolling the first booger of the movie between the fleshy blade of my finger shovel and the soft pad of my hitchhiking tool before our main characters even decided to show up.
To call the people hamming it up on screen “characters,” however, does injustice to that term, which when rightfully used should refer to the animated, soulful, dynamic beings who share a symbiotic relationship with the filmic story told through them. Here, the story progresses, if at all, in spite of the pink, fleshy things moving and making noises in front of the camera. Director Jacques Rivette deserves resounding applause just for managing to get these people to hold anyone’s attention for more than half an hour.
But then, Rivette has experience in this area. His most well-recognized and critically acclaimed films routinely exceeded two and half hours each. In fact, his 1971 effort Out 1 — based, like La Belle Noiseuse, on work by Honoré de Balzac — extends over half a day. I hope someday, out of morbid curiosity, to test the limits of my own patience by watching Out 1 in one sitting. Until then, I will content myself with knowing that I can make it at least a third of the way toward that goal because I have done so in watching La Belle Noiseuse.
The film, like far too many critic favorites, finds its genesis in the age old art-as-artist-creating-art metanarrative. The aging, semi-retired Frenhofer, played by Michel Piccoli, gave up on his masterpiece ten years before this story begins because he chose to love his model rather than the art she inspired. That model, Liz, played by Jane Birkin, has since become the painter’s wife, and the two have built a happy if not altogether exciting life together in the intervening years.
An art dealer friend of Frenhofer and, perhaps, one time lover of Liz, introduces the painter to an up-and-coming photographer, Nicolas, and Nicolas’ girlfriend, Marianne, played unabashedly by Emmanuelle Béart. While the men sit alone in Frenhofer’s studio, the art dealer suggests to the painter that Marianne would make an ideal model for his abandoned masterpiece. Nicolas, played by some guy whose name I don’t think anyone really needs to know, agrees to pimp Marianne out for the trouble, but conveniently forgets to tell Marianne that he has done so. Despite her affected anger upon finding out, Marianne leaves her hotel early the next morning to begin her new modelling gig.
That about sums up the story. The remaining three hours of the film contain little additional plot material or character development, but much ado about art and the process of creating it. The unmatched master of painting Bob Ross would scoff at the process of art creation depicted here, which lacks any semblance of joy whatsoever. If you enjoy ASMR, however, some of the scenes may appeal to you. Frenhofer’s early sketching sounds ominously like the unsteady hands of a newly minted dental assistant scraping plaque off your rear molars. At times during this movie I think I may have actually preferred receiving the shabby dental treatment.
Emmanuelle Béart does deserve some praise for play the suffering Marianne fairly well; the physical discomfort of the poses she had to hold through the film matched only by the mental discomfort I had in trying to justify keeping my television on. Indeed, one would have to say that if any character underwent any kind of “development,” Marianne did, at least physically.
Liz eventually starts to feel jealous of Marianne, not because she fears her husband will bed the model, but because she fears that the model will put to bed the painter’s passion for his art. This in itself represents the deepest emotional statement the film makes, and one I think it makes well, but did it really need four hours to do so? My nostrils, devoid of booger-making snot by the end of the first hour, say no. Frenhofer remarks early in the film that he spends his life running after a stroke; I spent the entirety of the film trying to avoid one.
Frenhofer ultimately completes his painting, though we as viewers never see it. He stashes it away behind a wall in his studio, ostensibly to placate both Liz and Marianne, the only others to have seen the completed work. The painter instead provides to the art dealer a less strenuously produced sketch, one made in the absence of any model. The art dealer accepts, seemingly content to have received any finished painting at all.
If Rivette, like Frenhofer, actually produced a better film but hid it away and offered this one instead, I feel cheated. I would much rather have preferred to see the real piece of art, the one labored on so joylessly for so long, then to see this pretentious semi-documentary on the process of making art.