La Belle Noiseuse

Emmanuelle B�art - so striking in Claude Chabrol's "L'enfer" (1994), not to mention Claude Berri's "Manon of the Spring" (1986) - is both compelling and irresistibly lovely in Jacques Rivette's 1991 masterpiece "La Belle Noiseuse," a title Cohen Film Collection declines to translate for the Blur-ray release of this marvelous 4K restoration. (Where they do offer a translation, the title is rendered as "The Beautiful Troublemaker.")

"La Belle Noiseuse" is a vision of some kind - Life? Meaning? Femininity? - that famed painter �douard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) once tried to capture on his canvas, but he fell short and retreated. Now, after a decade, the aging painter is ready to try once again, inspired by Marianne (B�art), the girlfriend of a photographer named Nicolas (David Bursztein) with whom Frenhofer becomes acquainted thanks to a mutual professional contact (Gilles Arbona).

Nicolas, awed by the painter, agrees on Marianne's behalf when Frenhofer asks if she would model for him. Initially furious, Marianne decides to take the opportunity to work with Frenhofer, but she's not meek. Rather, she interrogates the painter even as he brusquely arranges and rearranges her body and limbs, muttering that he'll "break her up" and "crumble" her in order to get to the essence he's chasing. Their intense work continues for only a few days, but the film has a quality of timelessness about it; on occasion, it seems as though they are laboring for weeks or months. Partly, this is due to Rivette allowing scenes of sketching and painting to play out in real time (using the hands of painter Berhard Dufour in the shots of art being created); we've sat through many minutes of composition's arduous, fumbling progress before Rivette offers any sort of ellipses or jump cutting to hasten things along. (Even before the work commences there's a comically elongated process Frenhofer engages in to get ready.)

But if time inside the studio is elastic, in the outside world - where Nicolas frets and curses himself as a fool, thinking that he's about to lose Marianne, while Frenhofer's onetime model, now his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin) wrestles with her own fears and insecurities - it keeps right on passing. Soon, Nicolas is compelled to cancel appointments with a gallery, prompting his worried sister, Julienne (Marianne Denicourt), to travel to the country estate where Frenhofer lives and works.

This film breathes and paces with the vitality of a living being. It's not until we're almost through the third hour of this four-hour-long cinematic epic when the first daub of blue hits Frenhofer's canvas, and that's when you know inspiration has arrived. The film's production design is so fraught with blue - from the tinge of Nicolas' drink in the first scene, to Frenhofer's shirt, to the doors of his barn-turned-studio and the inner precincts of his home - that you know it must lie close to the painter's heart. As the work begins to take form, artist and model enter the most intimate and intimidating phase of the dance they're doing, and art's capacity to destroy - which seems directly proportional to the artist's struggle to create - becomes ever more the true focus of the story.

The film's fluid, often languorous camerawork, as well as its lighting and sound design, speak to creative effort as something poised between quotidian and otherworldly. The sound work in particular suggests an active process - the scratching of various straight pens as the artist scribbles preliminary sketches sounds for all the world like a carpenter sawing away at wood. Something is being built here, as well as summoned through mysterious means. The visuals, meantime, seem to glide and melt.

There aren't many four-hour-long movies that can leave you breathless with excitement. "Fanny and Alexander" manages the trick; for some, the walloping five-hour-long cut of Wim Wenders' free-ranging "Until the End of the World" might do the trick, but that's a different sort of movie and, for various reasons, a harder haul. "La Belle Noiseuse" is a work unto itself in kind and effect, a film that's possessed and obsessive and worth obsessing over.

The Cohen Film Blu-ray presents the film on two discs, divided at the point Rivette playfully inserts an intermission where we, like the model, are invited to stretch and work out the kinks. The special features include a feature-length audio commentary (on both discs) and, on Disc Two, an interview with writers Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, who talk about the film's roots in a Balzac story and share various anecdotes about the talent involved and the film's structure; also, there's an interview with Jacques Rivette, who reveals the film's genesis in a "bad joke" that relates back to a previous project. The 2017 re-release trailer rounds things out.

"La Belle Noiseuse"
Blu-ray
$34.99
http://www.cohenmedia.net/films/labellenoiseuse