Emmanuelle Béart nackt

La Belle Noiseuse

The above title of the post has become the film’s secret title, like “Ein Kartoffelliebesfilm” for Roman Holiday or “Dunst im Schloss” for Marie Antoinette. Basically the attraction of the film is Emmanuelle Béart, although she actually looks less attractive than Brigitte Bardot or herself in the H&M commercials. It doesn’t matter though, although the film took a little while to get interesting (exactly an hour, in fact), I could have watched this film forever, I feel.

After finishing the film, I saw that that it’s an adaptation of Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu by Balzac, and quite a great one. But, it took me ages to finally get myself to watch this film, and the beginning of it was utterly boring. More than that, I have been annoyed at most (if not all) characters in the film and have found them very questionable, especially Frenhofer who just seems to be an old perverted oyaji to me, that’s it. Compared to that, Marianne is much more understandable, as she feels empty and has yet to find herself. (She doesn’t seem to do anything in her life after all.) If she needs to do so by posing naked, well, why not – it’s a very french thing to do so, I suppose. I do feel sorry for Nicholas, but it’s not like he actually did anything to prevent the worst to happen. For me, the worst character of all of them was Liz. Jane Birkin surely was very beautiful when she was young, but in this role, she just fades into an rather old, sexually frustrated looking woman, it’s quite a pity. I didn’t even like her as an actress as she always looked the same to me.

Another rather negative thing about this film are the clothes of the characters. Normally I really don’t mind, but in french films like these, style matters a lot. The only remotely nice thing Emmanuelle Béart has worn in this film was the dress at the very end – and even there her hair and the whole outfit is so 80s, uh oh.

Now that I have said so many negative things about the film, I should stress a bit more that I actually find it to be a really good film. The process of creating the artwork was really interesting for me and I thoroughly enjoyed watching Frenhofer drawing. It fitted the mood and blended in with the characters’ actions very well. The development of Frenhofer’s study of Marianne’s body was a pleasure to watch. In that respect, this film is exactly like “Va Savoir” – it starts off somewhat boring and extremely weird only to become quite enjoyable (funny in the one case, a visual feast in the other). I don’t even want to know how “Divertimento” is, because that is supposed to put an emphasis on the characters rather than the drawing process.

As much as I find the film interesting, I must admit that it’s not really accessible to me. I understand Marianne, but I can’t help but shake my head about Frenhofer’s emoness. Why do you need a model to create these kinds of paintings anyways? Where is the actual connection to the person or her appearance? French-style nude pictures honestly all look exactly the same to me. Actually my failure at understanding these things makes me want to try it out (either to pose or to draw).

One last thing I would like to mention is the fact that I have seen the last scene of “La Belle Noiseuse” along with the actual picture used in the film in the museum of the Cinémathèque francaise. That’s where I got the inspiration to watch this film from, and I’m glad I saw this. To some extent, it’s a beautiful film and quite unusual in its theme and execution, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it because of its length – and because I still am a fangirl of Emmanuelle Béart.

PS. Actually I wanted to brag about having managed to watch a 4 hours movie, but reading these comments, I suppose I have nothing to say anymore.