La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

Viewed from one perspective, Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse is one of the most specific films ever made about the creative process: it spends well over an hour of screen time observing the painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli, with a major assist from the hand of Bernard Dufour) as he prepares to paint a long-brooded-over project for which Marianne (Emmanuelle Beart) will serve as the model: his process involves first sketching in a book and then progressing to large canvases, studying her in ever-more rigorous poses in a search to excavate some kind of truth. One may often get lulled during these sections into the feeling of watching a form of displaced documentary, but Rivette’s rigour and scrutiny mystifies as much as it clarifies, and this is the source of the film’s true genius – to evoke, in a way which evades precise explanation no matter how often one sees the film, the capacity of art to bend perception and behaviour and understanding. Like many Rivette films, the film has elements of classic myth or fairy tale: Frenhofer’s vast home evokes an ancient castle with endless rooms and possibilities; his wife (Jane Birkin) evokes a lovely but somewhat doomed princess; there are hints of past traumas and conflicts which manifest themselves in various forms in the present; the finished painting is in various ways a site of danger and rupture, and must be banished for the sake of stability. All of this suggests an inwardness and hermeticism, but at the same time the film feels wondrously open and probing.The climax plays like a form of dance, the characters swirling around each other, testing new parameters and chemistries, but the final note suggests a wound that won’t readily be healed. The film is playful but never trivial, beautiful but never merely scenic, erotic but never prurient; it’s long (although not by Rivettian standards) but inexhaustible.