| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
A rather long winded movie about a figurative painter and the challenges of his life; primarily to tell the truth through his art. The distinction between cause and effect is blurred here to the extent that cause is more important than effect. This leaves the audience in the uncomfortable position of having cramp induced as we wait for something to light up the screen. It simply takes too long to get to the point.
However, it does score well in its treatment of painter’s block, the creative process itself and the inevitably-intimate relationship between artist and model.
Michel PICCOLI plays this kind of role without giving much evidence of any effort whatsoever. Jane BIRKIN is excellent as his helpmate wife while Emmanuelle BEART is simply brilliant as the artist’s muse. Her beauty makes here very easy to believe in this role along with her very great and real acting talent.
As befits the subject matter, nudity here is presented as natural rather than anything special (ie, “dirty”) à la the typical Hollywood presentation so that it never gets in the way of, nor becomes a substitute of, the storytelling - as it would in a California-based movie. Here nudity finds its proper expression in revealing temperament. But the painter struggles with his talent and his moral courage to capture what the camera appears to precisely because of this inability of cinema to reveal much about a thing simply by pointing a camera at it. This difficulty to capture essence rather than mere appearance leads to our desire frustrated desire to see the final result after four hours when the finished picture is never shown to us. As the painter becomes more and more passive his model becomes correspondingly active before the artist’s talent reasserts itself. In this way this movie is not only a meditation on the artistic process of fine artists but of cinema and all representational forms.
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