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| Emmanuelle Béart and Michel Piccoli in La Belle Noiseuse |
No matter how much critics and theorists of art may insist that it's about sublimation and pure form, nudity is inevitably about sexual desire. No film demonstrates that fact more clearly than Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, in which the actress Emmanuelle Béart bares her body on screen for the better part of four hours. Her character, Marianne, is persuaded by the aging artist Édouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) to pose for him in a variety of tortuous positions as he strives to paint what he hopes will be his final chef d'oeuvre. While Frenhofer and Marianne labor in his studio, his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), and her lover, Nicolas (David Burzstein) wait and fret, both tacitly suspicious that more than just the process of creating art is taking place behind closed doors. Liz was once Frenhofer's model, so she knows the possible outcome of a working relationship between artist and model, as does Nicolas, himself an artist. But it's to Rivette's great credit that the film finesses the issue of eroticism. We come to accept the essential role that Marianne's naked body plays in the formation of a work of art, and to understand the frustrations of turning the artist's fleeting vision into permanence. We see the hand of the artist -- actually the hand of Bernard Dufour when the rest of Piccoli's Frenhofer is out of camera range -- transforming flesh into line and pattern. Does Frenhofer create a masterpiece? We never know, because we don't see the finished product. He chooses to literally wall it off from other eyes and to show the public a rather banal painting in its stead. Art for the artist's sake, if you will. La Belle Noiseuse won the Cannes Grand Prix, and while I don't think the narrative content justifies its length, it's an exceptional film.