Jacques Rivette’s film is striking for its psychological complexity, its depiction of artistic practice, and marks a timely reminder of the disquieting capacity of images to disclose truths about ourselves.
Jacques Rivette occupies a distinctive place within the French New Wave. His films are characterised by the patience afforded to their duration, not to mention their philosophical ambition. In a late interview with Hélène Frappat, Rivette made this dimension explicit, claiming that there was “nothing more important than what we call metaphysics”, and citing philosophical heavyweights such as Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. Elsewhere in the same conversation, he spoke of a specifically cinematic truth, a vérité de film, akin to what Paul Cézanne called the “truth of painting”. Questions of metaphysical and artistic truth are privileged throughout Rivette’s work, but nowhere are they more powerfully realised than in La Belle Noiseuse. His 1991 art drama remains one of cinema’s most penetrating studies of artistic creation, yet its significance extends beyond its cinematic achievements: in an era dominated by digital self-representation, La Belle Noiseuse appears increasingly prophetic, anticipating contemporary anxieties about what images reveal.
Loosely adapted from Honoré de Balzac’s short story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’, Rivette’s 1991 adaptation unfolds as a prolonged confrontation between artist and muse on the sprawling grounds of a country estate near Montpellier. Young artist Nicolas (David Bursztein) and his girlfriend Marianne (Emmanuelle Beárt) are visiting the area, and are brought to meet the renowned, ageing painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) by art-dealer Porbus (Gilles Arbona). Over the course of the evening we learn that Frenhofer had originally begun a work called La Belle Noiseuse, with his wife as his model; however, driven to the brink of mutual destruction by the creative process, and facing the collapse of their marriage, he abandoned the painting – and with it, his whole artistic career. Ten years later, Porbus suggests that Marianne could serve as the model for a renewed attempt at La Belle Noiseuse, and Nicolas eagerly assents.
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Emmanuelle Béart’s Marianne is strong-willed and self-possessed, while Piccoli’s Frenhofer initially comes across as a forgetful, introspective figure. When they start working, however, he hardens, and becomes forceful, impatient, gracelessly repositioning Marianne with his hands. These early scenes encourage us to anticipate a collapse of acceptable boundaries, threatening a descent into predatory desire. We see the disparity in their ages and their professional status, her nudity, and our antennae prick up. Yet this is smoke-and-mirrors – a strategic ploy to smuggle in something far stranger. Frenhofer’s obsession belongs to another order entirely. “I don’t care about your breasts, legs, your lips. I want something more.” What he wants, he struggles to name: “Whirlwinds. Galaxies, the ebb and flow.” Later, he rejects even the notion that he wants something: “I want nothing. I told you, it’s the painting… You and I, we’re just involved.”
At first, Marianne is dubious, finding the old man’s lofty talk of truth and surrender faintly ridiculous. Yet as the work progresses, she begins to recognise both the difficulty and the exhilaration of what they are attempting together. In a crucial reversal, it is Marianne who insists they continue once the painter’s own conviction begins to falter, compelling him into the very condition he had theorised but failed to achieve: an egoless passivity in which artistic creation feels less like mastery than letting be.
Of course, one might suspect that Rivette is having his cake and eating it: cloaking voyeurism in art. After all, whatever the characters say or do, the audience spends long periods observing Emmanuelle Béart’s naked body. Yet this is precisely where the film’s duration becomes crucial. The sustained, meditative camerawork Rivette employs is fundamentally ill-suited to erotic excitement, while his treatment of the artworks allows us the pleasure of watching several iterations emerge in real time.
In the language of classical aesthetics, desire is an activated form of attention: it seeks fulfilment, it aims to realise a goal. The experience of beauty, by contrast, is disinterested. It takes pleasure in form without seeking to possess or appropriate the beautiful object. Marianne – and through her, the audience – gradually ceases to experience her body as something charged by erotic tension because, within the strange discipline of the studio, a transformation is taking place. She is becoming the site of an authentic artistic creation.
Once Frenhofer completes the painting, he refuses to let Marianne see it. Not easily dissuaded, Marianne slips into the studio alone at night and uncovers the work. In a cruel twist after so many hours spent watching the work come into being, Rivette withholds the image from us entirely. Marianne’s reaction tells us enough. She is profoundly disturbed. The painting has exposed some concealed aspect of herself that she would rather not acknowledge. Faced with a version of herself she can neither reject (because she knows it to be true), nor accommodate (because it is hateful to her), Marianne falls into despair.
There is a long narrative tradition devoted to images that inspire obsession. From the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion through to modernity, artists and writers have repeatedly told stories of images that acquire an unsettling power over those who behold them. Among these precursors, perhaps the most obvious point of comparison is Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, in which the portrait becomes something that its subject cannot bear to confront. Wilde belongs to a broader post-Romantic conception of art, indebted to the German Idealists mentioned above, like Hegel and Schelling, for whom works of art are capable of materialising truths. In this vein, Gray’s portrait does not imaginatively depict its subject’s likeness: it incarnates Gray’s corruption. It is the visible form of his disavowed self. La Belle Noiseuse fits neatly within this tradition. Like Wilde’s portrait, Frenhofer’s painting acquires a revelatory power, exposing Marianne’s core. Far from belonging solely to the nineteenth-century imagination, however, this anxiety has become newly relevant in a culture saturated with self-images.
In our digital era, portraiture has evolved into one of the most popular forms of contemporary self-expression: the selfie. Characterised by presentational conventions like flattering angles and controlled lighting, the modern selfie is designed to project an idealised self. Even sympathetic theorists of the selfie, like Nathan Jurgenson, defend the form on these grounds, claiming that selfies “make plain the ongoing process of identity construction … which troubles the idea that the self is transcendent, fixed, given.”
La Belle Noiseuse is a powerful reminder of an alternative view: Marianne experiences the shock of recognition precisely because Frenhofer’s portrait reveals a truth about her – something essential, something she cannot change. “A thing that was cold and dry,” she gasps. “It was me.” More intriguingly, the fear at the heart of this film may offer an insight into why the selfie is such a culturally prevalent form, and why people curate them so intensely: as an unconscious means of warding off the very condition Marianne finds herself in. In this light, the selfie functions as a compulsive form of self-expression through which the subject attempts to suppress the possibility of the feared, abject self by projecting an idealised identity.
In a surprising act of humanity, Frenhofer bricks his finished masterpiece within the walls of his studio prior to its unveiling. Beyond being a clear symbol of repression, this act strongly recalls another 19th century classic, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’, in which the narrator murders his wife and seals her body behind a cellar wall, brick by brick, in an attempt to conceal the crime. La Belle Noiseuse thus offers us a kind of proto-Romantic nightmare, haunted by an image that incarnates too much truth. Yet it would be wrong to overstate the latent horror of its narrative. Rivette’s film is equally one of cinema’s most patient and grounded studies of artistic creation. Whether one is drawn to its unsettling psychology or its quiet meditation on art, this remarkable film remains essential viewing.
