The Great Movies III

Does it sound boring to watch a man simply drawing for extended periods? Yes, it does. But it is not. Suspense is building. There is a contest between them, a battle of willpower. She is a nuisance. Elizabeth says she spent some time in Quebec, where noiseuse means "nutty."That's what Frenhofer wants. She begins to understand. She accepts the pain to prove she is the equal of his determination. One day when he despairs, she orders him to continue. She will see this through.

The painting is completed, but how it looks need not consume us. It is enough to quote how she describes it: "A thing that was cold and dry-it was me." What he does after finishing it is astonishing. No, he doesn't destroy it. It is his masterpiece, and he knows it is. So does his wife, who quietly visits the studio and draws a cross on the back of the frame, like a grave marker. Cross-shaped shadows from a window fall on their bed that night, and across his body.

Listen to the sounds in this movie. Rivette almost never uses soundtrack music, unless there is an obvious source, like a radio. He employs room noises at a higher volume than other directors: footfalls, doors slamming, plates rattling. The scratch of the pen on the paper is loud, and grows louder with his passion. When he is painting over Liz's face on a reused canvas, the noise of his brush swells. Listen very carefully during the scene where he has Marianne kneeling on a bench in a crucifixion pose. At first she cries. Then she starts to laugh, and he does too, and under their laughter you can hear the pen scratching, even though just now he is not using it.

Truffaut said that the French New Wave came into being because of Jacques Rivette (born 1928). He has never had the fame of his generation-Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Varda, Resnais. His films are said to be too long and difficult. There isn't the slightest difficulty in La Belle Noiseuse, and I would not want it any shorter, because I have shared that combat and that bond in that studio, and its devastating outcome.

Of the performances, there is nothing to be said about Piccoli except that he communicates exactly what Frenhofer needs from his art, and doesn't need many words to do it. Emmanuelle Beart has an ethereal beauty, but it is her talent that has made her a leading actress of her generation. We quickly feel, without any dialogue or behavior to spell it out, Marianne's nuisance quality, her nuttiness if you will. Is the coldness and dryness she sees in the portrait what Frenhofer desired her for, or despaired of? Jane Birkin, born in England, at home in both countries, finds the perfect and difficult note for Elizabeth, the wife. Does she sometimes wish he had finished his great painting the first time through, even if it had destroyed their happiness? That she had been more abrasive and less loved? She believes in her husband's greatness. That explains all the unanswered questions in this film, and there are some big ones.

he opening scenes of L.A. Confidential are devoted to establishing the three central characters, all cops. We may be excused for expecting that they will be antagonists; indeed, they think so themselves. But the film has other plans, and much of its fascination comes from the way it puts the three cops on the same side and never really declares anyone the antagonist until near the end. Potential villains are all over the screen, but they remain potential right up to the closing scenes. What the three cops are fighting, most of the time, is a pervasive corruption that saturates the worlds in which they move.

The movie also documents a specific time when the world of police work edged into show business. These days, when we can watch video recordings of cops actually busting suspects, when celebrity trials are shown on live TV, when gossip is the prime ingredient of many news outlets, it is hard to imagine a time when crime and vice lived hidden in the shadows. But they did, and the tipping point when that era ended must have been in the early 195os, with the rise of instant celebrities, scandalous tabloid magazines like Confidential, the partnership between Hollywood and law enforcement agencies, and the end of the media's reticence about seamy subject matter. L.A. Confidential (1997) shows the current era of sensationalism being born.

The first voice heard from the screen comes from the confiding, insinuating publisher of Hush-Hush magazine, Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito). He sets the tone: "insiders" know the score and are getting away with murder. His most valued contact is Detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), the technical adviser on Badge of Honor, a Dragnet-style TV show. Jack also stars in some of Hudgens's scoops. They set up celebrities or politicians in compromising situations, Vincennes breaks in to bust them, and Hush-Hush gets the story.