La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
The former famous painter Frenhofer lives quietly with his wife on a countryside residence in the French Provence. When the young artist Nicolas visits him with his girlfriend Marianne, Frenhofer decides to start again the work on a painting he long ago stopped: La Belle Noiseuse. And he wants Marianne as model.
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What critics compared La Belle Noiseuse to
And if Webber hasnât quite given us a study of painter and muse to rival the explosive agony of, say, Jacques Rivetteâs La Belle Noiseuse, he does spin a slight but considerably enchanting tale of impossible romance and artistic discovery.
Its story of romantic repression and artistic inspiration is somewhat trite, especially in comparison to a superior film about painting like Jacques Rivette�s La Belle Noiseuse.
But dawdling along as it does, “The Artist and the Model” merely calls attention to all the films that have covered the same ground, most of them just as slow and serene, most of them drawn to exactly the same details about the process of creation (“La belle noiseuse” may be the most carefully observed, and the most tedious).
You'd be forgiven for thinking we're talking about Jacques Rivette's great 1991 film "La belle noiseuse," but this less momentous telling of a similar tale bears the appropriately more prosaic title "The Artist and the Model."
“La Belle Noiseuse,” Jacques Rivette’s greater film with a similar plot, showed the tension and power dynamics in this sort of symbiotic creation through the relationships of two bodies in one space.
It is most fascinating in its setups and silences; the delayed introduction of the painter Frenhoffer (Michel Piccoli) owes a clear debt to Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (a favorite, much deservingly so, of the Cahiers crowd) and the artist's sittings, especially the first, with the physically striking Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) are masterful disquisitions on the tempestuous relationship between creator and subject.
The opening of “Concrete” bows to Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991).
McDormand’s composite Edna St. Vincent Millay figure is similarly facile, as are Del Toro’s tortured-artist intrigues, mixed with Léa Seydoux parodying the nudity in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, while Adrien Brody lampoons art-savant greed.
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Not content to rival Jacques Rivette’s long, extended artist-and-model nude collaboration scenes in the Eighties art-house hit La Belle Noiseuse (an adaptation of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece ), Sciamma betrays her cinematic heritage.
Think of the great Michel Piccoli, for whom Emmanuelle Béart so patiently posed, hour upon hour, in Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991), and whose intensity, like Mühe’s, never flagged.
But “Phantom Thread” has just as much in common with “Rebecca” as with Jacques Rivette’s recently restored “La Belle Noiseuse,” a movie dedicated to the painstaking process of creating art.
Not to mention his most complicated and beautiful film to date, Celine and Julie Go Boating, which is the closest Rivette ever came to getting inside cinema itself.
I became a fan of director Jacques Rivette in 1992 after seeing his four-hour La Belle Noiseuse on the big screen.