Cinema: Seduction on Canvas

• Share

He strips and contorts her, plies her, woos her, drives her to boredom, exasperation, tears. He is, in last week's favorite phrase, her mentor and tormentor. What the aging artist Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) does to his young model, Marianne (Emmanuelle Beart), as she poses for his first painting in years, is a disinterested kind of sexual harassment for art's sake. These sittings, a seduction on canvas, fill more than half of Jacques Rivette's four-hour La Belle Noiseuse. The phrase is loosely translated as "the beautiful nut case," but Frenhofer, not Marianne, is the genial lunatic: a man of the world who is a mad monk for his art. In his atelier the two act out a primal ritual of man appraising, adoring, subjugating and re-creating woman. This glamorous film, which won second prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival and deserved even better, can be taken as a commentary on the creation of anybody's art: hard work that is its own reward. Its mind is Rivette's, but its soul is in Beart -- gorgeous, quietly fiery, supple yet stubborn, yielding only surface secrets to the voyeur-artist in every gentleman. They may be all he wants. R.C.