Art Too Gets Born, It's Not Always Pretty

     Divertimento (1992)--I saw it maybe twenty years ago--is Jacques Rivette's two hour re-edit of his four hour long La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) from 1991.

     According to IMDB (I haven't seen the movie in so long I don't remember) Divertimento is from the

model's, Marianne's (Emanuelle Béart), point of view.

     Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) hasn't painted in ten years.  His friend, an art dealer, introduces him to a young couple, Marianne and Nicolas (David Bursztein, playing one of the most contemptible weak men I've ever seen).  Nicolas, a photographer, admires Frenhofer's work, foists his girlfriend on the genius to be the model for his abandoned masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse, noiseuse a slang term, apparently, used in Quebec, where Marianne evidently has lived, meaning "troublemaker" or "pain in the ass."

     Frenhofer says he got the inspiration for the painting by reading about a seventeenth century French courtesan, but Rivette treats this as a throwaway justification, hardly mattering to the overall story, much like the ancient Aeschylus plays rehearsed in Rivette's own masterpiece, Out 1 (1971), are of no importance except as activities some characters commit to creating thus a space in which the film's time plays out, ideas generate, and images form as people speak their truths and deceptions.

     Writing about Rivette, whose films and techniques, his slowness and pauses, make for the reviewing and criticism of unique works executed in manners unlike the techniques of films made by others.

     One can say, "There always seems to be some big mysterious house in his movies," and be correct, about some of the films (and there's such a building in Divertimento and La Belle Noiseuse) but what does the presence and imagery of such structures in his movies say about Rivette?  About his stories?  His characters, who are now feree to roam through mysterious empty corridors hand-made hundreds of years ago by craftsmen in a quieter world?

     When I saw Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais's second feature film from 1961) I didn't know about Rivette's empty interiors, not having seen Rivette's movies except for La Religieuse (1966), a great but relatively conventional film by that director, and though it has empty interiors, I didn't know then that was a thing with him.  But in Marienbad too, a hint of the mystery of ornateness embracing emptiness, just as in Rivette's films.

     Emanuelle Béart has a Medusa gaze.  Edouard tells her it disturbs him, doesn't explain why, much as he doesn't explain anything.  He's a remote fumbling creature, preoccupied, getting human again when it's time to eat and fuck his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), who served as original model of the great unfinished masterpiece.  She's too old to model for it now.

     Intro Marianne.  Nicolas, her boyfriend, volunteers her as Frenhofer's model so he can finish his painting which will then be purchased by the art dealer friend of Nicolas and Frenhofer and ultimately sold for millions.

     Frenhofer, a maddeningly distant person, has a hard time getting started with Marianne.  She's nude during at least twenty percent of the movie.  He puts her into difficult, straining poses.  He wants her to break past the pain and discomfort, leave her body.  He wants to, I guess, paint that, the ecstasy of the flesh.

     I suppose, or as the French might say, Je pense.  

     They spend a few days on this painting.  He does many drawings of her.  The scratching of the stylus is borderline hard to experience, almost fingernails on a chalkboard-like, but not quite.  Some artist's hands do the artwork instead of the actor Piccoli, who sticks to his particular talent.  We do see some wide shots of Piccoli doing some uncomplicated brushstrokes.

     Technique takes his mind over, he obliterates most of the original La Belle Noiseuse, covering it over with light blue and white paint, leaving for a while a faint blue image of Jane Birkin's face, but the painting is now turned perpendicular.  He puts a nude figure, Marianne's on there, the ass near Jane's face, as Liz points out.

     Frenhofer says something vague about the necessity of moving on from the past.

     Liz, a very patient woman, never quite gets up the gumption to leave him, her passive self triumphant.

     Jane Birkin, as Liz, shines.  She acted in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, playing one of two silly teenagers wanting to be photographed by the protagonist, a professional.

     Here, she's forty-five, sexy in a very soft, non-aggressive way, an Englishwoman playing an Englishwoman speaking French (sometimes pausing to ask how to say a word) living in southern France.

     Rivette for some reason emphasized the surliness of Nicolas.  Having, essentially, pimped his girlfriend to Frenhofer, Nicolas resents every second of it.  He's terrible, I hated him.  Rivette doesn't like him either, judging from the ending unrevealed by me.  Watch the movie, it ends with a word of dialogue that's like a thunderclap, proving one can make an exciting climax out of a single word, spoken in a certain context.

     I rented the film on YouTube.  Four dollars and nineteen cents to see the movie.  It was worth it.

Vic Neptune