Some movies are worlds that we can sink into, and La Belle Noiseuse is one of them. It is a four-hour movie, but not one second too long, in which the process of art and the process of life come into a fascinating conflict. There is something fundamentally sensual about the relationship between an artist and a model, not because of the nudity and other superficial things, which are obvious, but because the artist is trying to capture something intimate and secret from another person and put it on the canvas. It is possible to have sex with someone and not know them, but it is impossible to draw them well and not know them well.
The movie is about an artist in his sixties, who has not painted for many years. In his studio is an unfinished canvas, a portrait of his wife, which leans against the wall like a rebuke for the passion that has died between them. They are still happily married, but their relationship is one of understanding, not hunger. One day a young admirer brings his girlfriend to meet the artist and his wife. Something stirs within the older man, and he asks the girl to pose for him. She agrees, indifferently, and as he begins his portrait a subtle dance of seduction begins.
To understand the dynamic, you will have to picture the actors. The artist is played by Michel Piccoli, veteran of dozens of important French movies, he of the intimidating bald forehead, the vast eyebrows, the face of an aging satyr. The young woman is played by Emmanuelle Béart (Manon of the Spring), whose beauty may come from heaven but whose intelligence is all her own. Watching her here, we realize that it would not have been enough simply to cast a beautiful woman in the role, for the artist is entrapped by her mind, not her appearance. The artist’s wife is played by Jane Birkin (the daughter in Daddy Nostalgia), who knows her husband well enough to warn Béart against him, but not well enough to warn herself.
The sittings begin, and the artistic process takes over. And the film’s director, Jacques Rivette, takes a big risk, which works brilliantly. He shows the preliminary sketches, the pencil drawings, charcoals, and watercolor washes, in great detail. The camera looks over the shoulder of the artist and regards his hand as he draws. Sometimes the camera is on the hand for four or five minutes at a time. This may sound boring. It is more thrilling than a car chase. We see a human being taking shape before us. And as the artist tries one approach and then another, we see the process of his mind at work.
It is said that artistic processes take place on the right side of the brain, the side that is liberated from mundane considerations like the passage of time. I know for myself that when I draw, I drop out of time and lose all consciousness of its passing. I even fail to hear people who are talking to me because the verbal side of my mind is not engaged. Most films are a contest between the right and left brains, in which dialogue and plot struggle to make sense, while picture, mood, music, and emotion struggle toward a reverie state. In La Belle Noiseuse, the right side, the artistic side, of the viewer’s mind is given the freedom to take over, and as the artist draws, something curious happens. We become the artist ourselves, in a way, looking at the model, taking up the tools, plunging into the preliminary drawings.
The artist and his model do not get along very well. He is almost sadistic in his treatment of her, addressing her curtly, asking her to assume uncomfortable poses, keeping an impolite distance between her concerns and his own. She hates him. He does not care. It is a battle of the wills. But Jacques Rivette is an old and wise man, and so this movie doesn’t develop along simplistic lines in which love soon rears its inquisitive head. Here is where Béart’s intelligence comes in—hers, and her character’s. The battle between the two people becomes one of imagination, a chess game of the emotions, in which small moves can have great consequences.
You may think you can guess what will happen. The artist will fall in love with his model. The wife and the boyfriend will be jealous. There will be sex scenes. Perhaps to some degree you are right. To a much larger degree, however, La Belle Noiseuse will surprise you, because this is not a movie that limits its curiosity to the question of where everybody’s genitals will turn up.
The reason the movie benefits from its length is twofold. First, Rivette takes all of the time he needs to show the actual physical process of drawing. These passages are surprisingly tactile; we hear the whisper of the pencil on the paper, the scratch of the drawing pen, and we see that drawing is a physical process, not, as some people fancy, an exercise in inspiration. Second, having given the artist time to discover his model on his canvas, Rivette then gives himself the time to discover his own models. While the artist and model in the film are investigating one another, Rivette stands at his own canvas and draws both of them.
Le Boucher
PG, 93 m., 1970
Stéphane Audran (Hélène), Jean Yanne (Popaul). Directed by Claude Chabrol and produced by André Génovès. Screenplay by Chabrol.
She is a schoolmistress, he is a butcher; their everyday lives obscure great loneliness, and their ideas about sex are peculiarly skewed. They should never have met each other. When they do start to spend time together, their relationship seems ordinary and uneventful, but it sets terrible engines at work in the hiding places of their beings. It is clear by the end of the film how this friendship has set loose violent impulses in the butcher—but what many viewers miss is how the schoolmistress is also transformed, in a way no less terrible.
Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher takes place in the tranquil French village of Trémolat, and like almost all of his films, begins and ends with a shot of a river, and includes at least one meal. It seems a pleasant district, if it were not for the ominous stirrings and sudden hard chords on the soundtrack. It is a movie in which three victims are carved up offscreen, but the only violence visible to us is psychic, and deals with the characters’ twists and needs.
There is no great mystery about the identity of the killer; it must be Popaul the butcher, because no other plausible suspects are brought on screen. We know it, the butcher knows it, and at some point, Miss Helene, the schoolmistress, certainly knows it. Is it when she finds the cigarette lighter he dropped, or does she begin to suspect even earlier?
The movie’s suspense involves the haunting dance that the two characters perform around the fact of the butcher’s guilt. Will he kill her, too? Does she want to be killed? No, not at all, but perhaps she wants to get teasingly close to being killed; perhaps she is fascinated by the butcher’s savagery.
During a class trip to the nearby Lascaux caves and their wall paintings, she speaks approvingly of Cro-Magnon Man. His instincts and intelligence were human, she says. A child asks: What if he came back now, the Cro-Magnon? What would he do? Miss Helene replies: Maybe he would adapt and live among us. Or maybe he would die. Is she thinking of the butcher?
Perhaps even at their first meeting, she was fascinated by the danger she sensed in Popaul (Jean Yanne). Miss Helene (Stéphane Audran) is seated next to him at the wedding of her fellow teacher, and the first thing she sees him do is carve a roast. Notice how avidly she follows the movement of the knife, how eagerly she takes her slice, how she begins to eat before anyone else has been served. And notice, too, how she seems curiously happy, as if she has found something she was looking for; she is intense and alert to the presence of the butcher.
As the wedding ends and he walks her home to her rooms above the school, Chabrol gives us a remarkable unbroken shot, three minutes and forty-six seconds in duration. They walk through the entire village, past men in cafés and boys at play. She takes out a Gauloise and lights up, and he asks: “You smoke in the street?” She not only smokes, she smokes with an attitude, holding the cigarette in her mouth, Belmondo-style, even while she talks. She is sending a message of female dominance and mystery to Popaul. Later, when he visits her, he sits on a chair that makes him lower than her, like one of her students.