La Belle Noiseuse (1991) ****

I’m taking the Jacques Rivette test. Aka the bum-on-seat test. How easily can you sit through a four-hour intimate epic is often seen as the true test of your credentials as a critic. I have to confess I’ve failed this test once. Twice, to be truthful. I walked out – twice – of Celine and Julie Go Boating Go Boating (1974). But as I’m partial to tales of creative endeavor, a sucker for any story about an artist, this seemed more promising.

This director does something so clever you wonder why the idea wasn’t applied before. Maybe it was, but nobody fessed up. The star of this show in many ways is neither Michel Piccoli (Topaz, 1968) as artist  Frenhofer nor Emmanuelle Beart (Mission: Impossible, 1996) as model Marianne but the real-life painter Bernard Dufour. We never see Dufour’s face, only his hands. For it’s he who sketches and paints, not the actor. So we don’t have any of that nonsense where an actor purportedly spent a year preparing for the role, learning to play an instrument or whatever and then showing all too obviously that he/she is doing something by rote rather than inhabiting the skin of a true artist.

But that does also mean we don’t have to skate over a lifetime’s worth of painting or music or whatever to get to the painting or piece of music for which the character became famous and we don’t need to dwell on background or career development or any other issue that might have hindered /affected/ charged their progress.

This is, beyond a couple of introductory scenes, the story of how an artist paints and his relationship with the model and how that changes both of them. Rivette, having given himself all the time in the world, takes all the time in the world, so we go from initial sketches, ink on crackling paper, to an outline of an idea, to the false steps, wrong steps and true steps.

The awkwardness between artist and model is cleverly captured. Marianne feels she has been traded. Her boyfriend Nicolas (David Bursztein), a rising artist, hopes to win favor with the established artist by pushing her into the project without first asking her approval. Quite what makes her accept the (unpaid) job is unclear but then there are no academic studies on amateur models to provide clarification beyond a sense of excitement at being asked.

She takes in her stride the perfunctory reality that she will be naked virtually the whole time. That aspect of the film might have been viewed as somewhat prurient, but, in fact, it sheds light on just what a model does, what is asked of her, and why, and the idea is killed off right away that an artist always has a clear idea of his composition before he embarks on a painting.

Here, Frenhofer spends as much time trying to get to the heart and soul of his subject, to understand the shape and lines of her body, as he does on the actual picture. He wants to combine her characteristics with whatever he has in his head. There’s another element to the story. He tried to paint a similar picture a decade before, with his wife Liz (Jane Birkin) as the model. For reasons unstated, he abandoned the painting.

Although there’s a twist at the end, there’s not much more to the story than a painting being created from start to finish, including all the finicky bits like deciding on the pose and the size and shape of the canvas and the colors etc.

Yes, it’s incredibly long and not long in the way of Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese or Ridley Scott where length is the result of trying to cram in too much, characters, details, storylines, complications or visualisations a director could not resist. But it’s endlessly fascinating and for many the best movie ever made about the creative process, all the more so because although documentary in style it’s not documentary in execution.

Both actors are superb, not least for the concentration this must have taken, since development would have taken place in minute detail.

I think I passed the Rivette test. Celine and Julie….hmmm, still not so sure.

Well worth four hours of your time.