"La Belle Noiseuse" and "L'Enfer" are two French movies starring Emmanuelle Beart, directed by two very different directors who emerged from the French new wave, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, respectively. "La Belle Noiseuse" starts out with a young artist and his wife, Marianne(Beart) visiting legendary artist,
Frenhofer(Michel Piccoli), in the countryside. Frenhofer mentions a long abandoned project - La Belle Noiseuse, a painting of a 17th century courtesan. The young painter, Nicolas, offers his wife as a model without asking her. This of course angers her to no end but nonetheless she returns to pose the following morning. I liked "La Belle Noiseuse" in that it tries to convey the artist-model relationship and how it evolved as the painting continued. It is a beautiful looking film and I especially liked it when it got both artist and model in the same frame. It also examined the relationship of an artist to his/her spouse and how self-involved the artist can get. So much so, that the spouse needs to find an individual life. Frenhofer's wife(Jane Birkin) seems to have a thriving taxidermy hobby on the side and Marianne may have found a path by the end of the movie. Emmanuelle Beart gives a very courageous performance. "L'Enfer" starts out with the marriage between a happy young couple, Paul(Francois Cluzet, who reminded me of a young Robert DeNiro) and Nelly(Emmanuelle Beart). Paul is the owner of a thriving resort hotel but the stress and lack of sleep is driving him to become very, very jealous of his wife. What we see is from Paul's point of view and thus we get to see his growing madness but I do not like the idea that madness can be used as an excuse for Paul's abusive behavior. By abusive, I mean that he tries to control Nelly's movements and I find that rather unpleasant. Plus, this is a shoddily shot movie.
March 28, 2005
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