The Great Movies III

What he captures above all in Killer of Sheep is the deadening ennui of hot, empty summer days, the dusty passage of time when windows and screen doors stood open, and the way the breathless day crawls past. And he pays attention to the heroic efforts of this man and wife to make a good home for their children. Poverty in the ghetto is not the guns and drugs we see on TV. It is more often like life in this movie: good, honest, hardworking people trying to get by, keep up their hopes, love their children, and get a little sleep.

Frenhofer, the great artist, has painted nothing for ten years. He threw down his brush in the middle of painting what was intended as his masterpiece, to be titled Le Belle Noiseuse, or "the beautiful nuisance." His model was his wife, Elizabeth, who inspired the great period of his career. "At first he painted me because I loved him," she tells a friend. "Then he painted me because he loved me."And then he stopped, perhaps because he feared that to achieve his painting would be to destroy their love. Frenhofer does not see the outsides of his models, but the insides-bones, sinew, soul.

One day three visitors call at the vast French chateau where Frenhofer still lives with Liz. They are an art dealer, a young artist, and the artist's lover, Marianne. These two have been together three years. Marianne is aloof, quiet, strong willed. There is a moment after dinner the first evening when Frenhofer regards her, and their whole relationship is contained in that look. She is walking away from him, but she is certainly aware of the look, or of the feeling behind it. He will pick up his brush again.

Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is the best film I have ever seen about the physical creation of art, and about the painful bond between an artist and his muse. Winner of the Palme d'Or prize at Cannes that year, it ran to a full four hours, and so its theatrical life was limited. Rivette edited a 125-minute version titled Divertimento, but why bother with it? The greatness of La Belle Noiseuse is in the time it spends on the creation of art, and the creation and destruction of passion.

Frenhofer is played by Michel Piccoli, the saturnine French star whose eyes can bore through other actors. With his high forehead and sculpted profile, he looks intelligent, but it is a formidable, threatening intelligence. He never plays the fall-guy. He always knows the story. Marianne, the young woman who inspires him, is played by Emmanuelle Beart, who at twenty-three had electrified audiences with Manon of the Spring (1986). Startlingly beautiful, with sensuous lips and deep eyes under arched brows, she seems at first a prop for a familiar story: the old artist will attempt to seduce her. Ah, but he wants more than that. He wants to possess her. And he wants to draw from her irritating willfulness the inspiration for his rebirth. He must have an abrasive to create.

His wife, Elizabeth (Jane Birkin), fully understands this, and explains to the sister of Marianne's boyfriend: "It's not about the flesh. Not about nudity." She says she doesn't worry about "How do you say it? An affair." She knows him too well. She even persuades Marianne to accept her husband's invitation to model. "But do not let him paint your face," she warns. There is a whiff here of The Portrait of Dorian Grey in reverse: the painting will steal the vitality of the model.

What I have described so far is merely plot, and in this film plot hardly concerns us. The great central passages of the film involve creation. In his cavernous stone studio, which reminds Marianne of her boardingschool chapel, Frenhofer begins to sketch her. We observe over his shoulder. Rivette use a static camera and long takes. He rarely cuts away. We see a blank sheet of paper, and the drawing taking shape there. We see the physical process: First, Frenhofer's obsession with arranging his pens, his brushes, his inks and paints. Then the first tentative lines on the page. Impatient stabs with the sharp pen. Washes of Payne's Grey (my favorite) at various dilutions. His fingers and thumb smearing the washes into rough shapes. Later, on a larger scale, he works with charcoal. Then oil.

"In the wardrobe upstairs, there is a dressing gown," he tells her. She understands, puts it on, disrobes in front of him, and will be entirely nude for at least at hour in this film. Yes, at first we observe Emmanuelle Beart as a woman. Then we see her as a model. Slowly we come to see her as Frenhofer wants to: the woman inside, the essence, the being. There is no small talk. He positions her in poses. He yanks her arms and legs like a puppet's. "In the old days," he says almost to himself, "they tied the arms and legs of the models into place, to keep to them from moving." She complains of pain and cramps, wants to have a cigarette. He takes cigarettes out of her fingers, and pushes her into position.