Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Béart

La Belle Noiseuse is a thrilling and unconventional drama about the responsibility of an artist to his vision and the conflicts that arise when such responsibility is perceived as a threat to o...( read more  read more... )thers. Michel Piccoli (Le Doulos) delivers one of his finest, most lived-in performances as Edouard Frenhofer, a famous painter living with his artist wife Liz (Jane Birkin) on a spacious estate in the French countryside. Frenhofer has lacked inspiration for a decade and has given up on painting. The idea behind his unfinished masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse ("The Beautiful Troublemaker"), has been seemingly unattainable for a decade; Liz was the original model for it, and Frenhofer's exhaustion with the project has an emotional parallel to his dispassionate relationship with her.

Along comes a rising artist, Nicolas (David Bursztein), who suggests that his girlfriend, Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), a writer, could help Frenhofer jumpstart the painting's completion. From this point, most of La Belle Noiseuse becomes a remarkable, seemingly unedited and privileged look at the development of a bond between artist and muse. Béart, fiercely brilliant, spends the majority of the film nude and continually molded into sometimes-painful positions as Frenhofer struggles--sketch after sketch, paint upon paint--to find something beyond the obviousness of Marianne's body. As the two struggle to meet each other halfway, Liz and Nicolas feel marginalized and jealous, putting pressure on Frenhofer to disregard such personal concerns or give in to them. Adapted by French New Wave master Jacques Rivette from a story by Honore de Balzac, the lengthy La Belle Noiseuse is fascinated by the artistic process; it is itself a patient process of watching ideas and aesthetic courage reveal themselves in the face of extraneous aversion. --Tom Keogh

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83% liked it

1,986 ratings

Critics

100% liked it

21 critics

Unrated, 240 min.

Directed by: Jacques Rivette

Release Date: September 4, 1991

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DVD Release Date: July 6, 2004

Stats: 132 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (132)


  • June 14, 2007
    I hoped for so much more from this film than I got. I wanted to feel the artist at work, but instead I felt my butt writhe uncomfortably in my seat thorughout the long directors cut of this film.
  • December 22, 2008
    Unique experience,transparent penetration to the painter's workshop....Rivette on top of the worldwide mindfuck coalition.
  • June 22, 2009
    PAN AND SCAN. Como alegoría del arte como verdad que desenmascara la vanidad, es fascinante y apasionada. Sin embargo, la forma como se allana el camino hacia la poderosa conclusión se siente algo manufacturada y sobredramatizada. / As an allegory of art as truth that unmasks van...( read more)ity, it is fascinating and passionate. However, the way it builds the path towards its powerful conclusion feels somewhat manufactured and overdramatized.
  • June 11, 2009
    emanuelle beart is Stunning !! the movie is technically awesome but Very long.
  • July 3, 2008
    want to see this because it won best foreign-language film with the LAFC
  • March 21, 2008
    I did not really like this movie.
  • November 22, 2007
    Emmanuelle Beart ja seria razao suficiente. Mas o Rivette foi se tornando um de meus diretores favoritos. Esse foi o primeiro dele a que assisti. A representação da arte aqui é irresistível.
  • September 3, 2007
    Ladies be warned mainly a guy flick as Beart is nude in 90% of the movie. Not that im complaining :).
  • July 15, 2007
    the realistic scratchy sound of a paintbrush repeated ad noiseuseum grows on you, especially considering what, i mean who, the subject is

Critic Reviews


January 1, 2000
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Some movies are worlds that we can sink into, and La Belle Noiseuse is one of them. full review

View more La Belle Noiseuse reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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  • Which French actress has appeared in the films Manon Des Sources, La Belle Noiseuse & Mission Impossible?  Answer »

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