LA BELLE NOISEUSE: Painting Through the Art of Cinema
Jacques Rivette is most remembered, and notorious, for directing loose storylines over the course of several hours. His thirteen-hour multi-character study, Out 1, is commonly regarded as his masterpiece. Just before, Rivette had directed L’Amour Fou, a drama about a crumbling marriage covered over four hours. His most famous and iconic movies are no different, either. The tongue-in-cheek, metamodern Celine and Julie Go Boating clocks in at over three hours, whilst the main topic of discussion in this essay, La Belle Noiseuse, again pushes the four-hour mark. Needless to say, these few films in Rivette’s filmography equates to the entire length of some directorial careers.
The length of a film often carries certain stigmas. Predictably, there is usually a sense of pretension. Those truly great films that certainly warrant, and earn, their lengthy runtimes can frequently transcend into the category of cinematic art. It is true to say that most cinema is probably intended to be art – that is, something that creates a resonant or emotional experience – but it tends to be only a small percentage of titles that cement their place. Rivette, as proven through his acclaimed career, is very much considered a cinematic artist.
It’s not at all unusual for acclaimed films to focus themselves on the artistic and creative world. Theodoros Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players – another four-hour drama – may be about the history of Greece, but these events unfold through the eyes of a troupe of theatre actors. Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt focuses on a playwright who ends up working in the film industry. It even features an extended part for director Fritz Lang, where he is playing himself. However, what Rivette does with La Belle Noiseuse is seamlessly combine two different art forms: he captures the art of painting through the art of cinema.
La Belle Noiseuse – literally meaning The Beautiful Female Troublemaker – stars Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Béart as a rundown artist and a reluctant model, respectively. Piccoli’s Édouard Frenhofer is introduced to Béart’s Marianne through a young and eager protégé of his. Frenhofer, having been unable to paint anything for years, uses Marianne as fresh inspiration, eventually allowing him to take on a painting which he had started years before, which his wife was the original model. Eventually, Frenhofer and Marianne gain an intimate understanding and respect of each other, with Marianne posing nude for hours and days on end. Béart’s casting as Marianne is near revelatory in considering this text as art. Béart, at the time, was a huge sex symbol and icon and spends a large majoirty of La Belle Noiseuse fully nude. For context, Béart appeared nude in an issue of Elle magazine and every copy sold out in three days. Yet, within La Belle Noiseuse, Béart’s nudity is captured and presented almost virtually without any sexuality towards it, at all.
The process of being able to present one of the era’s most sexually eminent women in such a way can actually be compared to a recent film. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin sees Scarlett Johansson portray an alien who preys on men. Considering she is probably the most prolific sex icon of the past decade, her nude debut onscreen was almost guaranteed to have attracted some attention. Instead, due to the context it was presented in, the lack of sexuality spoke volumes and the scene went largely under the radar. It’s the context in La Belle Noiseuse, too,
that enables the film to play out without it ever feeling sordid or seedy. Béart herself has explained that she wasn’t exposing her ‘ass’, but rather her ‘soul’. And it’s that context again, that allows the film to further explore artistic forms.
In particular, it is the literal depiction of the art of painting that is at the forefront of this film. Beginning with pencil sketches and moving up to ink, before finally paint, Rivette chooses to spend a large majority of the film with Frenhofer, as he begins to rediscover his artist’s passion. Several chunks of La Belle Noiseuse consist of the camera focusing on a blank page that Frenhofer turns into a portrait of Marianne. Every line, every blemish, every brush stroke is captured, and it is fascinating to behold. This is where Rivette truly creates art in a way that hasn’t been captured before. It isn’t just the fact that he uses the art of cinema to document the art of painting. It goes further; with every sketch or painting that Frenhofer creates, it is telling us his feelings toward Marianne. Likewise, Marianne’s growing admiration towards Frenhofer is expressed throughout her attitudes towards the modelling. Rarely a word is spoken between the two that isn’t a command on how her posture should be – instead, Rivette lets the camera and the canvas tell us what’s happening. He lets the art tell the story. And we hear every word.