Main Cast: Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart, Jane Birkin, David Bursztein, Marianne Denicourt
Release Year: 1991
Country: FR
Run Time: 240 minutes
Plot
In this fascinating and unconventional examination of the creative process, an artist near the end of his career finds new inspiration in a young model. Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is a famous and well-respected artist who lives in a comfortable estate in the French countryside. At the age of 60, Frenhofer considers his career as a painter to be over; he says he no longer feels any inspiration to create, and his last attempt at a major work, a nude study of his wife Liz (Jane Birkin) called "La Belle Noiseuse" (The Beautiful Nuisance), has sat unfinished for ten years. Just as Frenhofer has lost his enthusiasm for his art, he has also lost his passion for Liz; their relationship is polite and friendly, but without enthusiasm. When Frenhofer tells Nicolas (David Bursztein), his young protégé, that he no longer feels the desire to paint, Nicolas suggests that he needs a more inspiring subject, and he offers his girlfriend Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) as a model. Frenhofer is taken with Marianne's beauty, and, with Liz's cool approval, he and Marianne spend several arduous sessions together, exchanging ideas and opinions as Frenhofer methodically attempts to create a final masterpiece. While La Belle Noiseuse runs 240 minutes, director Jacques Rivette also prepared an alternate version, La Belle Noiseuse - Divertimento, which runs 120 minutes, features a different framing sequence, and incorporates takes unused in the original cut. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
The creative process is a largely internal affair, which may be why so few good films have been made about it: it's all but impossible to make thought visually interesting. But, more than almost any other film, Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse makes visual and narrative sense of the annoying, exhausting, frustrating, but joyously fascinating work of creating art. While painter Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) and his model Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) often discuss art, life, and creativity during the film's 240 minutes, much of the time we're simply looking over Frenhofer's shoulder as he works, first making preliminary sketches and then putting paint to canvas. While it doesn't sound terribly interesting (and in many hands it might not be), Rivette's patient eye and subtle rhythm allow us to see how scratchy lines or blobs of paint can grow into a portrait of a beautiful woman. Rivette also shows how many paths are explored and abandoned, how many choices are made and then revised, how many variables have to be worked out, as the artist attempts to create something unique. In La Belle Noiseuse, art is damned hard work, and, if it's a long and agonizing process, Rivette makes it almost as interesting to watch as to do. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
A famous but reclusive painter, Frenhofer (Piccoli) lives quietly with his wife and former model (Birkin) in a large château in rural Languedoc-Roussillon. When a young artist visits him with his girlfriend Marianne (Béart), Frenhofer is inspired to commence work once more on a painting he long ago abandoned - La Belle Noiseuse - using Marianne as his model. The film painstakingly explores Frenhofer's creative rebirth, using lengthy real-time takes of the artist's hand (provided by Bernard Dufour) working on the canvas.
The film had a good critical reception, and occasioned much comment on Béart's frank onscreen nudity and Rivette's characteristic use of an extreme running time.
Rivette used alternate takes from the film and made changes in the scene order to produce a 125-minute version, La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento, for television; it was also released theatrically in 1993.
Merry-Go-Round (1981) •Le pont du Nord (1981) •Love on the Ground (1984) •Hurlevent (1985) •Gang of Four (1988)
1990s
La Belle Noiseuse (1991) •Divertimento (1991) •Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles (1994) •Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons (1994) •Up, Down, Fragile (1995) •Secret Defense (1998)
