On Movies

I used to love going to the movies. One place I used to live, the owner of one downtown cinema was a Shakespeare fan so every winter he would show a different Shakespeare film every Sunday matinee. Classics, of course: Polanski's Macbeth, Zefirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Olivier's Othello, Peter Brook's King Lear and probably a couple of others I have forgotten. There was also a small film festival where I saw a lot of European films like Devil in the Flesh and Fellini's Satyricon. In the 1980s there was a wonderful efflorescence of Australian film with Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Walkabout and others. But it was when I moved to Montreal that I really got to see a lot of films: because of the bilingual culture, there are first-run French cinemas, first-run English cinemas as well as repertory houses where I saw things like Last Tango in Paris, Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute, Luc Besson's Le Grand Bleu and La Belle Noiseuse. I don't translate that last title because, like Les Misérables, there is simply no possible English version.

I saw La Belle Noiseuse, directed by Jacques Rivette, as a first-run film in Montreal in 1991 or 92. And I just realized that that was probably the last really great film I saw! Every few years I wander up to our local cinema, with very poor selection, to see the latest, but I don't even remember them. I saw 300 a few years ago... But while entertaining, that's not a great film. I watched the new Dune on streaming a few weeks ago and not only is that not a great film, it is as bad as the novel it is based on. I'm obviously not a Frank Herbert fan, though Hellstrom's Hive is interesting.

But back to La Belle Noiseuse. I just got the DVDs because I really wanted to see all of it again, this time with sub-titles because I can't follow the French anymore. This is a four-hour film that seems to swoop by in half the time. Some films, I am exhausted by the crappiness in the first five minutes and, honestly, most films I give up on three-quarters of the way through. The feel of La Belle Noiseuse is so different from movies today that it is shocking--at the beginning, shockingly normal. What happens in the first 53 minutes? Let me summarize: Nicolas and Marianne, a young French couple (he is a painter and she a writer) go to visit a famous, though retired painter, Édouard Frenhofer and his wife Liz (who does taxidermy). They are introduced by the art dealer Porbus. They have dinner and afterwards Nicolas and Frenhofer talk about reviving a long-standing but never realized project of painting "La Belle Noiseuse" but this time with Marianne (played by Emmanuelle Béart) as the model. And that's it.

What is shocking? No spandex costumes or special effects where characters are thrown hundreds of feet with no injuries. No quipping. In fact, this could be any dinner with perfectly ordinary, though artistic, people. This could even be any dinner in any century almost because, except for one scene a minute long when Nicolas talks on the phone--an old-fashioned handset--there is nothing that is not age-old. The fact that this ordinary dinner is shot in a leisurely, ordinary way is actually shocking since we are so used to movies that are mannered and artificial to an extreme. Then comes the first drawing scene which you can watch for yourself, it starts around 53:30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEiZvDY1uPw&t=6s

It's incomplete, but watching to the end of the clip will give you an idea. It says that this is "part 1" but it is really just the first half of part one. This is the only film that actually gives an accurate representation of the act of creation: the scratchy pens, the elusive washes, rubbing with the fingers, the almost random strokes and then, magically, out of nothing, suddenly we see a face... Sure, we see Mozart composing in Amadeus, but frankly, it's a put-up job with no resemblance to the real thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b2pyEvp8ls

All movies about classical music, without exception, are romanticized bunk, including Amadeus, though that is the best of a bad bunch. I don't know films about painting very well, but it is probably a similar situation. La Belle Noiseuse is a great film and watching it we realize just how rare great films are these days...