La Belle Noiseuse is a 1991 film directed by Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette is a French film director. His most well known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the cult film Out 1....

 and starring Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin

Jane Birkin

Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE is an English-born actress and singer who lives in France. In recent years she has written her own album, directed a film and become an outspoken proponent of democracy in Burma.- Early life :...

, and Emmanuelle Béart

Emmanuelle Béart

Emmanuelle Béart is a French film actress, who has appeared in over 50 film and television productions since 1972. Béart won a César Award for Best Supporting Actress in the film Manon des Sources . She has been nominated a further seven times for Most Promising Actress and Best Actress.- Early...

. Its title means "The Beautiful Troublemaker". The film is loosely adapted from the short story "The Unknown Masterpiece

Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu

Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is a short story by Honoré de Balzac. It was first published in the newspaper L'Artiste with the title "Maître Frenhofer" in August 1831...

" by the nineteenth-century French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 writer Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

.

Plot

A famous reclusive painter, Frenhofer (Piccoli), lives quietly with his wife and former model (Birkin) in a large château in rural Languedoc-Roussillon

Languedoc-Roussillon

Languedoc-Roussillon is one of the 27 regions of France. It comprises five departments, and borders the other French regions of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Rhône-Alpes, Auvergne, Midi-Pyrénées on the one side, and Spain, Andorra and the Mediterranean sea on the other side.-Geography:The region is...

. When a young artist visits him with his girlfriend Marianne (Béart), Frenhofer is inspired to commence work once more on a painting he long ago abandoned - La Belle Noiseuse - using Marianne as his model. The film painstakingly explores Frenhofer's creative rebirth. It uses lengthy real-time takes of the artist's hand (provided by Bernard Dufour

Bernard Dufour

Bernard Dufour is a French painter. He was notable for abstract painting after the Second World War, and later for portraits and human figures.- Life :...

) working on the canvas.

Reception

The film won the Grand Prix

Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)

The Grand Prix is an award of the Cannes Film Festival bestowed by the jury of the festival on one of the competing feature films. It is the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d'Or...

 at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival

1991 Cannes Film Festival

- Jury :*Roman Polanski *Férid Boughedir *Whoopi Goldberg *Margaret Menegoz *Natalia Negoda *Alan Parker *Jean-Paul Rappeneau *Hans Dieter Seidel *Vittorio Storaro...

.

The film had a good critical reception, and occasioned much comment on Béart's frank onscreen nudity and Rivette's characteristic use of an extreme running time.

Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times

The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...

film critic Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 added the film to his Great Movies collection in April 2009.

Alternative version

Rivette used alternate takes from the film and made changes in the scene order to produce a 125-minute version, La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento, for television; it was also released theatrically in 1993.

Cast

• Michel Piccoli - Édouard Frenhofer
• Jane Birkin
  Jane Birkin
  Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE is an English-born actress and singer who lives in France. In recent years she has written her own album, directed a film and become an outspoken proponent of democracy in Burma.- Early life :...
  
   - Liz
• Emmanuelle Béart
  Emmanuelle Béart
  Emmanuelle Béart is a French film actress, who has appeared in over 50 film and television productions since 1972. Béart won a César Award for Best Supporting Actress in the film Manon des Sources . She has been nominated a further seven times for Most Promising Actress and Best Actress.- Early...
  
   - Marianne
• Marianne Denicourt
  Marianne Denicourt
  Marianne Denicourt is a French actress, who has appeared in about 50 film and television productions between 1986 and 2009....
  
   - Julienne
• David Bursztein - Nicolas
• Gilles Arbona - Porbus
• Marie Belluc - Magali
• Marie-Claude Roger - Françoise
• Leïla Remili - Maid
• Daphne Goodfellow - A tourist
• Susan Robertson - A tourist
• Bernard Dufour
  Bernard Dufour
  Bernard Dufour is a French painter. He was notable for abstract painting after the Second World War, and later for portraits and human figures.- Life :...
  
   - The painter's hand

External links