La Belle Noiseuse (Rivette, 1991): ICA Cinema, 2pm
This screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since the 70s is one of the most
penetrating examinations of the process of art making on film. It
concerns the highly charged work of a figurative painter (Michel
Piccoli, giving the performance of his career) with his beautiful and
mainly nude model (Manon of the Spring’s Emmanuelle Beart), but also the
complex input and pressures of the painter’s wife and former model
(Jane Birkin), the model’s boyfriend (David Bursztein), and an art
dealer who used to be involved with the painter’s wife (Gilles Arbona).
The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and
rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been as
spellbinding as it is here. The film runs for four hours, but the
overall effect is mesmerizing and perpetually mysterious (as Rivette
always is at his best), and not a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb
sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty
of twists. Freely adapted from Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece
by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette, with exquisite
cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the
south of France (mainly a 19th-century chateau), and drawings and
paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. The title, incidentally,
translates roughly as “the beautiful nutty woman” and is also the title
of the masterpiece the painter, emerging from ten years of retirement,
is bent on finishing. Winner of the grand prize at the 1991 Cannes film
festival.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
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