Imaginary Conversations on Film #6: La Belle Noiseuse (1991) Jacques Rivette
- This conversation should be long and it makes me speechless. I’m going to tell you about the body.
- What body?
- The body ascribed to the male modernist artist under the rule of patriarchy.
The binary relationship artist/model is made obvious right from the beginning of the movie: Nicolas, a painter, is sitting at a café making a sketch of a stranger woman sitting at the table opposite of him.
I once asked a guy if I could draw him, he was sitting at the table next to mine. I was with my friends and I made one of them go and ask him because I was too shy to do it myself. He agreed, but he kind of felt offended at my request. I understand how awkward and rude it can be to break into someone’s privacy, turn the other into a self-conscious being, and all in the name of “art.” It was a humiliating experience for me, it changed me.
Marianne, Nicolas’ lover, is up on the terrace sneaking to take a picture of him. He looks behind: there I caught you! She comes down and he takes the picture from her, she pretends to be an undercover journalist snapping pictures of a celebrity. He paints from pictures. They were playing: switching roles.
He’s the artist, she’s the lover of the artist. But he isn’t a maker of masterpieces. He still sketches stranger women at cafes. The film had to develop a character which makes masterpieces. The characters become three: the artist (Nicolas), the model (Marianne), the art dealer (Porbus). They go together to meet the Artist, the maker of masterpieces, Frenhofer. They meet his wife Liz first, he shows up late with a body of a dead rabbit. Liz preserves the bodies of dead animals and makes portraits with them. “Animals pose too” Porbus tells Liz.
- What about Liz's body?
Frenhofer, used his wife Liz as a model for a painting titled: “La Belle Noiseuse/ The Beautiful Troublemaker.” He exhausted her body to the point of failure. He never finished the painting. Ten years later, with a rabbit in his hands, he meets Marianne. “Would you accept losing him for a painting?” Frenhofer asks Marianne over the dinner table.
“…used Liz as a model.”
“…Marriane losing him for a painting.”
The painting is what matters, the masterpiece remains, the rest is lost and disfigured.
Frenhofer, Nicolas, Porbus: The Artist, artist, art dealer. These three meet at Frenhofer’s studio and start talking about the painting, but they end up talking about tMarriane's body. Porbus, the art dealer, wants “La Belle Noiseuse” as a commodity, Frenhofer wants his masterpiece, Nicolas agrees to let Marianne pose. Now as I have outlined the set of relationships we have here, the question of why Nicolas has the authority to Marianne’s body is an urgent one. One answer could be is that he already situates himself in the artist/model binary, and would one day like to make a masterpiece. Another answer could be is that he believes in the myth that a painting has a truth that should be reached, and that he wants to know the truth of Marianne. The only answer is that this has been the history of “Art meets Patriarchy.” Three men make a deal, and the body is Marianne's.
Marianne gets mad at Nicolas for giving an artist the permission to tear her apart. She nonetheless walks into the trap at ten in the morning. The movie lasts four hours, we spend most of the movie’s length in Frenhofer’s studio. “We want the truth in painting, it’s cruel!” He had the title from the beginning, all he needed now was the body, and truth beyond that body. He makes a sketch of her dressed, then a sketch of her face. “Don’t stare at me like that, it disturbs me.” I see her struggle with her body as it is being turned into lines. He too struggles with the sketch book: he makes rough lines with black ink, then wets his brush and smudges black paint on different places on the paper. They both are anxiety ridden: he might lose his masterpiece, she might lose herself. The stakes are high with every sketch, with every canvas being rolled out and pinned on wood.
“There’s a robe up there.” She comes back a female nude. The female nude has a long history in art: “the female body has so often been identified with the body as such.” As time passes, Marianne’s body takes different poses and shapes, each more difficult to hold on to: still life. His sketches are like Man Ray’s Photographs: a woman without a head who has feet peeking out of her ass. Frenhofer tells Marianne, that as a kid he used to enjoy dismembering dolls. He tells her he wants what’s beyond the nudity, the truth, the blood. The first day ends, she tells Nicolas that Frenhofer has changed her.
The next day she goes back, she says she was going to take over. She brings the mattress and prepares to pose. Marianne wants to seize control, she wants to lose herself on her own terms. But the space gets more tense, tenser than her limbs. The poses get harder, and her arm keeps loosening as she snatches a cigarette. “You can’t smoke now we have work to do.” She tells him how his studio reminds her of her time at the boarding school, she wasn’t allowed to do anything. At one point they get really drunk, she is still posing but he can’t pin her down anymore. “I keep losing you, oh I found you again.” She slips between lost and found. But he doesn’t want her, he wants the masterpiece. “I started painting Liz because I wanted her.” But he stopped painting Liz.
He exhausted her body, he exhausted the canvas. “Never let him paint your face.” Liz warned Marianne. They say the face is the mirror of the soul, too much violence has been done to her body, he could spare her soul. He has no need for the soul, he has the body and the truth he thinks resides within it. And the only means to find that truth is by destroying the body, turn it into lines and colors and call it a masterpiece.
In part, I feel that Marianne agreed to play the role of the model to get away from the shackles of her relationship with Nicolas. But as the movie unfolded, I found that she was as invested as Frenhofer in the making of “La Belle Noiseuse.” It’s as if she wanted to reach some kind of truth about herself. When she saw the finished painting, she thought of it as a cold dead thing. “It’s me.”
There’s a long distance an artist needs to cross to create a painting that on his mind bears the weight of a “masterpiece.” But the power of this film is that it shows what distance the “model” takes in order to lose herself.
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