LA BELLE NOISEUSE Movie Review

Divertimento
The Beautiful Troublemaker

An aging, retired painter, whose marriage has become more of a deep friendship than a love affair, is introduced to an exquisite young woman and decides that he must paint her. He does. Four hours of screen time later, the painter has completed his work, the three principal characters have undergone unexpected changes, and the audience has been moved in ways that movies rarely lead us to expect. When I saw La Belle Noiseuse on screen for the first and only time, I became so involved with it, so excited by the supremely risky way in which the director, the then 63-year-old Jacques Rivette, told a story that in retrospect seems entirely unsuited to movies, that it seemed less like a screening than a real experience. Having emerged satisfied and with rich memories of the four hours I had just spent, I decided I would never mess with perfection by ever watching it in its entirety again. (It was Gene Siskel, I think, who once noted that you can only see a movie for the first time once.) That my reaction parallels an important moment in the film is an irony that only struck me later, yet because I never have experienced this astonishing movie again, I have no idea how it works on video. My only caution to you is this: don't break La Belle Noiseuse into shorter viewing sessions, don't pause it, fast-forward it, back it up, or mess with it in any way. Just watch it. Rivette's miraculous ability to capture the process of creating a drawing, then a painting, all influenced by the emotional drama taking place between model and artist, is something I've never seen on film before. Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart, and Jane Birkin are ideal as the artist, model, and wife, and cinematographer William Lubtchansky's images are breathtaking. But it's Rivette's uncanny feel for an artist's creative rhythms—the rhythms of life and its creation—that makes it all work.

NEXT STOP … Divertimento, Edvard Munch, Dream of Light

1990 240m/C FR Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Beart, Jane Birkin, David Bursztein, Marianne Denicourt; D: Jacques Rivette; W: Jacques Rivette, Christine Laurent, Pascal Bonitzer; C: William Lubtchansky; M: Igor Stravinsky. Cannes Film Festival '91: Grand Jury Prize; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards '91: Best Foreign Film. VHS NYF, FCT, ING