Category Archives: Movies

PARTY GIRL

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Although it has its defenders (Johnathan Rosenbaum among them), Nicholas Ray's 1958 film Party Girl hasn't got nearly the reputation it deserves.  On the surface it has a familiar plot — a mob lawyer motivated by love to break free of his past — and it's a period film, set in gangland Chicago in the 1930s.  It's shot in Cinemascope and Metrocolor.  For all that, it's pure Fifties, and very noir.  In traditional movies with the same theme, even Polonsky's dark Force Of Evil, a decent world is waiting to embrace the repentant mobster.  In Ray's film, as in all real noirs, things aren't so simple.  The cops are bunglers, the moral lines are always blurred — at the climax, the hero makes a last desperate attempt to save himself and his true love with yet another phoney lawyer's trick, just like the ones he used to save guilty thugs from justice.

The tone of the whole film is brutal, cynical — the world it depicts is a maze with no center, no escape . . . except one, the love of a good woman.  The good woman, contrary to the conventional wisdom, is a recurring type in films noirs — almost as common as the femme fatale.  We find her in classic noirs like The Dark Corner and Ray's own On Dangerous Ground — a force of salvation for the boxed-in, royally fucked male protagonist.  In this film, Cyd Charisse's good girl is not so good — she's as cynical and lost as Robert Taylor's corrupt lawyer.  The role is a perfect fit for Charisse's slightly opaque screen persona, and a perfect match for Taylor, who can be equally opaque.

Their somewhat wooden styles, as Rosenbaum points out, have never been put to better use dramatically.  It's actually touching when they recognize each other as kindred spirits — people in whom the flames of hope and passion have been all but extinguished.  Their psychic wounds are mirrored in recurring images of physical disfigurement — in Taylor's slightly crippled leg, in the threat of using acid to mar the mask-like beauty of Charisse's face.

The Metrocolor isn't used for glamor.  The colors are garish, lurid, sometimes deranged.  The film was produced by Joe Pasternak, who usually handled musicals at MGM.  Charisse, who plays a showgirl, is given a couple of production numbers that look like the covers of Les Baxter LPs come to life.  The choreography is crude but shows off Charisse's icy erotic quality to great effect — the numbers are almost like parodies of Minnelli's exotic style.

Ray uses Cinemascope brilliantly, with lots of subtle camera moves that quietly direct our attention to action unfolding within the wide frame.  There's a powerful gangland rub-out montage that almost certainly influenced the one at the end of Coppola's The Godfather.  There are first-rate performances in supporting roles by Lee J. Cobb and John Ireland.

It's a great film, one of Ray's best, and is now available on DVD for the first time through the Warner Archive.  Fans of Ray and of film noir in its last, Baroque phase (best exemplified by Welles's Touch Of Evil) shouldn't miss it.

THE MOVIES BEGIN . . . AGAIN

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When new technologies appear, the instinct is to try and figure out ways to make them the vessels for existing content.  But new technologies usually need a new kind of content — or old content wholly re-imagined.

When it became possible to distribute movies on the Internet, everybody tried to figure out how aging, worn-out Hollywood content could be shifted over to the new venue and monetized.  It was an effort doomed to fail.  Content can never be considered apart from the means used to distribute it, and thus the ways it is consumed.

What we need to do is look at what kind of movies are working on the Internet, and proceed from there.  What's working are short comedy bits, short sexy images and actualities — real-life anecdotal videos of a cute or startling nature.

It's strikingly like the content that first made movies popular, when the technology of projected film first hit the scene at the end of the 19th century.  Films were novelties then — people had no way conceptually of consuming them as self-contained works.  So they were shown as peep-show attractions in arcades or as interludes on vaudeville bills.  What people responded to were . . . short comedy bits, short sexy images (a dancer showing a bit of leg was soft porn back then), and actualities, real-life anecdotal films of a cute or startling nature.

Plus ça change, huh?

But people soon grew tired of these snippets.  They wanted longer, more coherent pieces, which meant that they wanted stories.  But it wasn't possible to jump straight to any existing story form.  Attention span still could not support film stories the length of plays, much less novels, or even short stories.  Ten minutes was the absolute limit of attention one could count on from an early film viewer — about the length of a vaudeville skit.  So a whole new form of storytelling was developed — one that incorporated short comedy bits, sexy stuff and documentary footage (of trains, for example.)  But now these were integrated into a narrative.

Audiences had to learn to absorb these short narratives before they could be expanded into feature-length film narratives — into an evening's entertainment.  It happened remarkably fast, primarily because the ten-minute and then the twenty-minute form was developed with such brilliant invention by storytellers like Griffith.  The density of content and suggestion in Griffith's one-reelers and two-reelers, and the extraordinary beauty of his images — like the one above from The Country Doctor in 1909 — eventually made it clear (to some) that movies could hold an audience's attention for even longer than twenty minutes.

Filmmakers need to start anticipating what story forms are going to work on the Internet.  There will not be a straight jump to feature-length narratives, or even half-hour narratives.  Even the length of a ten-minute vaudeville skit is probably too long.  What's needed are stories no longer than a cute cat video.

Can stories, real stories, be that short?  Of course they can.  Micro-fiction is as valid a form of fiction as any other — if it is dense with content and suggestion, if it can conjure up whole worlds beyond the frame of its images and brief running time.

Hemingway was once challenged to write a six word story.  He came up with this — “For sale, baby shoes, never used.”  That tells a real story, and a good one.  It resonates in the mind and in the heart, like any good story.  The micro-movies that will introduce real narrative content to Internet cinema will have to learn that kind of dynamic compression, and they will have to be told in images of genuine beauty, depth and inventiveness — there will be no room for the slick, throwaway non-images of the current Hollywood cinema, which have to be hurled past us at lightning speed because they would not reward close scrutiny.

This path is really the only way forward for filmmakers of the Internet era.  It may seem like re-inventing the wheel, but filmmakers of the nickelodeon era were also re-inventing the wheel when they tried to figure out how to put over a grand Biblical epic in ten minutes.  They seem to have had an awful lot of fun doing it, though, and in the process they created a new art form.

An essay like this can't really suggest the kinds of films I'm proposing, but my friend Jae Song is currently directing a series of movies in New York — I call them Majestic Micro Movies — which will make the whole thing clearer.  You'll be able to watch them soon — here, there and everywhere.

IMAGE PIE

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Get your slice here, courtesy of Bill Bowman and his wife Adrienne Parks, image-makers and wordsmiths in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Bill is one of my oldest friends.  I made my first movie with him when we were 12, our own 8mm version of Frankenstein, a masterpiece of cinematic juvenilia.  I wrote the script for it.  I had never seen a script before and I assumed it must consist of little drawings of each shot with a description of the action and dialogue written next to it.  The storyboard was reinvented!

Bill (above, with Adrienne) played Dr. Frankenstein, I assayed the role of the Monster, wearing a papier-mâché headpiece unskillfully joined to my own head with liquid latex.  (Liquid latex is cool!)  We had read that Jack Pierce spent eight hours applying Karloff's make-up and we felt we could not in good conscience devote less time than that to the process, so we woke up at 2am on the first day of shooting in order to have the make-up perfected by the morning.  After half an hour we had done all we could to transform me into the Monster, so we removed the make-up and went back to sleep, reapplying it at first light.

Bill and I have been making movies ever since.

HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS — IN THE HEART

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Bob Dylan’s Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .

Finally Dylan comes up against a song with a precedent he can’t really improve upon or add much to.  Judy Garland’s recording of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, done for the soundtrack of Meet Me In St. Louis, is the definitive version of the song, treading the line between the lyric’s sadness and its hopefulness with sublime delicacy.

It’s only her soundtrack version that rules, though — the recording she made for the song’s commercial release on Decca is very fine but not quite as moving.  This was true of many of her movie songs, which she really “acted” on the MGM recording stage, then performed in a more neutral style for Decca.

Dylan’s version is very fine, too.  He sings it tenderly — but somehow he misses the melancholy, half-panicked undertow of Garland’s soundtrack recording.  Only on the line “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” does he suggest that things might be worse than he’s letting on elsewhere in the song.


                                                                                        [Image © 2009 Drew Friedman]

Sinatra, on his similarly fine recording, also misses the full measure of melancholy that Garland conveys — though like Dylan he has his moments.  When he sings “so have yourself a merry little Christmas now” you can feel a sense of doubt and resignation that gets to the song’s core.

Garland is aided greatly on the soundtrack recording by Conrad Salinger’s subtle but deeply expressive arrangement, which brilliantly evokes the melancholy mode without hitting you over the head with it.  This allows Garland her own subtlety in interpreting the song — you feel its sadness without quite being conscious of it, at least on a first hearing.  On subsequent hearings you realize that Garland’s character in the film is not just trying to reassure her younger sister with the sweet song, she’s trying to reassure herself — and not quite succeeding.

Garland’s is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time — to say that Sinatra and Dylan almost give her a run for her money is high enough  praise for any singer.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

ONE STEP BEYOND — DON'T GO THERE

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Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) offers another meditation on an extraordinary bit of American culture from days gone by, the T. V. series One Step Beyond.  If you don't remember it, or never saw it, Paul suggests that you might do well to keep it that way, just for your own peace of mind:

EXCRUCIATING — BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE . . .

by Paul F. M. Zahl


Way Out, Roald Dahl's television show, was the ugly one, the ghoulish
one, the cruel one.


Twilight Zone was the high end of these early television gems of the fantastic — moralistic and righteous, at times redemptive and even hopeful. 
Christ got at least two positive mentions in the Rod Serling scripts,
and the team effort showed in the artful results.


But in between, in between the cruelty of Roald Dahl and the justice of
Rod Serling, came the observing eye of . . . John Newland.


Newland is barely remembered today, but in the late 1950s and early
1960s (and even into the 1970s) he produced, directed, and acted in
scores and scores of  television shows, mostly in the supernatural or
thriller line.  Speaking of Thriller, Newland directed “Pigeons from
Hell” for that great series, scaring us all where it counts — early
childhood — and leaving us with that tender scar forever.




Newland's big achievement was hosting three seasons of a series concerning the
paranormal.  The series was entitled One Step Beyond.  It was created by Merwin Gerard and consisted of
thirty-minute 'docu-dramas' of supposed instances of possession,
ghostly presence, telepathy, and predictions of dreadful futures.


I have been watching One Step Beyond since the day it was birthed, in
1959.  Almost all of the shows have been on video since the beginning,
as they were somehow in the public domain.  And now — there is a God
— Paramount has released the first season of One Step Beyond in
splendid condition.  Oh, and the music, especially the theme called
“Fear”, written by Harry Lubin, is the ultimate science-fiction/horror
theme.  Anyone who is reading this would recognize it instantly.  (I
listen to it right before bedtime every night.  Mary loves it, too.)


But what has come to me in recent viewings, with an almost stunning
power, is a sort of personal truth about the inner spring of these
tight dramas.  It is a truth about the supernatural in general, and it
springs from its source.  These stories, with few exceptions that I can
see, are about love lost or love gone wrong.  Someone has lost someone,
and is desperate with grief.  He or she is completely naked to the
possibility of contact.  Or someone has done somebody wrong, and the
guilt is killing them.  Or, even, somebody hates somebody else, and the
hate gets objectified, in some kind of paranormal occurrence.




Below are some examples of what I am talking about.  (“The Dead Part Of
the House” is available on the official Paramount DVD release (above), the
rest are available for download or viewing through YouTube or related
sites.)


Season One, Episode Nine:  “The Dead Part of the House”


A widower hates his nine-year-old daughter because she survived an
accident that killed her mother.

He resents his little girl.  And she knows it, and the child is
perishing for love, in front of his eyes.

She develops three ghostly friends, and in a benign move, these
supernatural friends are able to bring her father to his senses.




Phillip Abbott plays the father and conveys an irrational paternal
hatred, based on a love for his wife gone awry, that is painful to
watch, in the extreme.  The little girl is entirely sympathetic, and so
completely shaken.  Moreover, the child's kind aunt is powerless over
her brother.


It is Tennessee Williams, as far as I am concerned, on a claustrophobic
'50s television set, yet completely unself-conscious.


Season Two, Episode Seven: “The Open Window”


A painter of fashion models — his current model is played by Louise Fletcher —
observes a woman in an apartment across the way preparing to commit
suicide.  She has been rejected romantically and her little
black-and-white four-walled world is killing her.  Her disconcerting
monologue and preparations, overheard and observed, have several
antecedents in theater and movies.  But the television camera closes in
on her, with dissection.  It is impossible to watch.  And it's only
1960!


As for the denouement, you'll have to see it yourself.  But it's not
really about the genre, it's about human attachment severed and love
torn to shreds.  How did Newland, who produced and directed, get this
out at an early hour Friday night?  I don't think anybody at the
network or the sponsor must have seen it as serious, because it was
about, uh, ESP.  But it was very serious.


Season Two, Episode 20: “Who Are You?”


A little girl wakes up in her bed and doesn't recognize her parents. 
Her parents are loving, devoted, and dear.  She runs away and finds the people she believes to be her parents.  They, for their part, are living in a total darkness of grief, having
lost their own little girl recently.

The little girl we are watching is possessed of the spirit of the
other, dead little girl.  And she is horrified by the attentions of her natural parents.  And her grief-stricken 'real' parents are horrified by her.

This child is totally lost, but alive and real, a whole self of
yearning.

When “Who Are You?” is over and the implications of the first 20
minutes — these shows are all 29 minutes long — begin to sink in, the
situation becomes excruciating.


In short, don't watch this.


Just two more examples, but they can be multiplied by a score of others:


Season Two, Episode 32: “Delia”


Here is a humdinger, which begins so quietly and prosaically that the
middle section takes you completely by surprise.


A vacationing American man is trying to recover from a second lousy
marriage, and is drinking in a bar on a quiet island off Mexico.  Another American, a sexy divorcée, at a table nearby, invites him
over.  She is beautiful and the kind of woman most men would love to
meet under such circumstances.  But he turns her down.  He is
impossible.


He takes a self-pitying walk down to the beach, and half way down,
meets an extremely beautiful, refined, and quite un-sexy woman sitting
alone by a tree.  She knows all about him, connects with him instantly
— as he with her — and they are completely and in a single minute one
in love forever.  She is the lost and final love eternal, with eternal
eyes and never-ending smile. 


He exits for a moment, comes back — and she is gone.


He spends the rest of his life searching for her, and ends up back on
the island, where he awaits her return, and drinks himself to  death. 
I won't give away the ending.


This little parable is the ultimate dream of romance between a man and
a woman.  Drink to me only with thine eyes.  I will spend my life
awaiting your return.  And die in the process.


After you see “Delia” once, it becomes impossible to watch it again. 
Get thee behind me.  (Get thee to a nunnery) 

He should have stayed with the giving brunette.  Hélas, he didn't.


Season Two, Episode 33: “The Visitor”


This one is a celebrated episode.  It starred Joan Fontaine, with Warren
Beatty, in either his first or second appearance ever.


It concerns a woman in older middle-age who has left her husband,
against his will, for the bottle; and has pulled herself completely
within herself at their cozy mountain get-away.  A nice fire is burning
on a snowy night, there's plenty of money, and there's a bar full of
whisky.  But a young man knocks at the door, his car having broken down
in the snow, and he is trying to get to the hospital where his young
wife is having a baby.  He cannot get there.


Who he is and why he is there and what he has come to do?  All is
revealed, neatly and affectingly. 

Again, this is about love gone wrong, about malice as the consequence of hurt,
about grief causing people to go mad — and all on a minuscule set, with one
camera, two actors, and dread, with heart. 


Don't see this one either.




I watch these episodes of One Step Beyond and have to tell myself not
to watch any more.  They are saturated with grief.  They are fistfuls of loss and love that
is separated, by the curtain of death, from fulfillment, even promise. 
Yes, there is compassion — and none whatever of the ghoulish joy in
karma that Way Out featured every time.  I would call these instances
of Baby-Boomer television masterpieces of wrecked emotion, and love's
attachment snapped forever.


How come these are so powerful — if “excruciating” means powerful?  I would like to finish this article by trying to say why.


In the first place these are completely uncompromised one-act plays. 
The camera prowls around — I honestly think of Rossellini and the
inquiring camera, maybe even the camera as protagonist, though I fear
that sounds pretentious.  (I invoked Tolstoy once in a conversation
with Joe Dante, and he suddenly started to look at me coolly.  I sure
wanted to withdraw that particular comment.)  Yet it is true that John
Newland's camera moves around a lot, in interior spaces about the size
of a closet most of the time.  In addition, his close-ups, which are
numerous, completely fill the screen.  These are intimate dramas —
they are about one or two, or at the most three, characters.  The
people's faces are tortured.  They are anguished.  The unflinching
close-ups mostly record grief and separation.  What are ghosts
in these stories other than objectified presences of love become
unattainable?  Thus the excruciating atmosphere of One Step Beyond.


There is one other thing:


When  I was eight and nine years old and saw shows like this, I
definitely connected with the fear and dread. But

I didn't really get the truth.  The psychology was completely at the
edges, or rather, out of the question. 

I just knew, to my bones and my nerve ends, that something serious was
going on.


Too serious.
 

Twilight Zone, which saved the day, was more distanced somehow.  It
didn't raise the resistance that was raised by One Step Beyond. 
Neither could I have appreciated The Glass Menagerie.  (Still can't
watch the last act.)


My advice to you, dear reader, is Skip This One.  Sit It Out.


It's too close to home.  Take away the supernatural part of it, and
there is only human loss.


Oder — and I truly wish I had done this when I was president of a
theological seminary — show “Delia'”and “The Dead Part of the House”
to a class for future ministers on . . . pastoral care.  In the church,
and in the frayed and hungry world around us, you're going to encounter
quite a few Delias and a whole directory full of The Dead Parts of
Houses.

THE NATIONAL TREE

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Corey and Rock are father and son, with all that that entails.  They're hauling the National Christmas Tree across the country, to its rendezvous with a lighting ceremony in front of the White House — but something happens to it along the way.  The giant Sitka Spruce captures hearts and repairs old wounds, in people and in the nation itself.

It will be rolling through your hometown tonight, wherever you happen to live, on the Hallmark Channel, at 8 o'clock, in a movie written by my friend J. B. White, with a slight assist by yours truly, based on the novel of the same name by another friend, David Kranes, and produced by a third friend of very long standing indeed, Cotty Chubb.

If you have a taste for some old-fashioned Christmas sentiment, check it out.

CELEBRATING CARLA

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In a recent post I noted the 100th birthday of horror movie and Baja California icon Carla Laemmle.  Imagine my delight and surprise when I heard from Scott MacQueen, a reader and friend of mardecortesbaja, that he knew the great lady and had hosted her birthday party in his own home, doing the cooking for it himself.  (Scott's recipe for Beef Burgundy will appear on this site in the not too distant future, as soon as I have a chance to try it out in the world-famous mardecortesbaja test kitchen.)

Scott also sent along a picture of the festivities, above — with Carla flanked by David Skal (author of Hollywood Gothic) on the left and by Rick Atkins (co-author of Among the Rugged Peaks, Carla's biography) on the right.  (Click on the titles of the books to buy them!)

Ms. Laemmle looks — there's just no other word for it — adorable.

CARLA AND RAY

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Carla Laemmle recently celebrated her 100th birthday.  She was the
niece of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, and she had a
modest career as an actress and dancer in Hollywood.  She appeared
uncredited as a ballet chorine in the silent version of The Phantom Of the Opera and had a
bit part in Dracula, speaking the first words in that film as a
passenger in the coach taking Renfield to his fateful rendezvous at the
Borgo Pass.  (That's her on the left above, wearing glasses.)


She is now the last surviving cast member from those two iconic horror
films, and thus an icon in her own right for horror movie fans.




She interests me for other reasons, because of her life after the
movies.  She became the lifetime companion of Ray Cannon, another
Hollywood professional — actor, writer, director — who left the
business to pursue other ventures.


Cannon became a sports fisherman, supporting himself mainly through
writing about the subject.  He was among the first to explore the
fishing possibilities of Baja California, helping to popularize the
peninsula as a fisherman's paradise and a potential tourist Mecca.  He
fell in love with it in the late 1940s, before the crowds came, spending
much of each year
there on various fishing expeditions, and eventually wrote the text for
a best-selling picture book about the area, The Sea Of Cortez.




A wonderfully-illustrated collection of his other writings about Baja
California, The Unforgettable Sea Of Cortez, was published recently and
it's a fine evocation of the
peninsula in the days before the tourist boom.  Outside the precincts
of Ensenada at the top of it and and Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of
it, Baja California hasn't changed all that much since the time Cannon
discovered it.  Over-fishing by commercial interests has depleted the
Mar de Cortes to an alarming degree, but it's still one of the richest
sports fishing spots on earth, and the gracious old city of La Paz has
yet to be despoiled by the California duppies.


The landscapes and seascapes that Ray and Carla loved are still there
— severe and beautiful and brimming with opportunities for adventure.

LA BELLE, LA PERFECTLY SWELL NOISEUSE — 2

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Part Two — The Case For the Defense

As I wrote in the first part of this look at Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, the film can be appreciated on one level as sheer melodrama.  The tensions of the story are so well established and developed that one's attention is riveted on their inherent suspense throughout the whole four-hour length of the film.  The acting, especially by Michel Piccoli and Emanuelle Béart, is very fine — nuanced but intense and alive.

The characters' understanding of what is happening to them may be facile, and it may seem to mirror the filmmakers' understanding of what is happening to them, but the dramatic dynamics of the story are sound and believable and well-observed.

But the level on which the film truly excites is the documentary.  A great deal of La Belle Noiseuse simply records the process of an artist working with a nude model.  Piccoli, as I say, is convincing as the artist, but much of his work is shown in close up, with the hands of a real artist creating works on paper and canvas before our eyes.  All of the film's intellectual claptrap about what art is dissolves in the miracle of art coming into being in real time while we watch.

In all of these passages, Béart is naked before us, too.  There is so much nudity that we cannot read any of the passages as a “nude scene” — as that conventional and usually contemptible device which presents the exposed female body as a sop to the male gaze, a titillation, a visceral punchline.  We see the whole woman here, as the artist is trying to see her, not in bits and pieces, not as tits and ass, but as “the nude” — a glorification of the female form, and the female essence.

The sight transcends the erotic and becomes powerful in another way — as a symbol of the male's eternal struggle for existential gravity, part of which has always involved paying homage to, celebrating, female power.

Nudity in modern films is almost always obscene.  The idea that it can sometimes be done with “body doubles”, flashing a little tit here, a little ass there, is beyond obscene — it is depraved.  It doesn't just commodify women, it exposes the full cowardice of the collapsed male psyche.

If La Belle Noiseuse did nothing more than strike a blow against this depravity, take a small step towards the redemption of the female nude in art and culture, it would be an important film.

DAY OF THE DEAD: ALL SOULS DAY

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Welcome to the day of restless souls . . .

The poster above comes from the ever-astonishing Golden Age Comic Book Stories site.  I don't know how he does it, but the proprietor of that site puts up, almost every day, high-res scans of amazing works of popular art, by no means limited to comic book art.  There's also a generous abundance of classic book and magazine illustration and promotional art for movies.

Check it out — it's one of the Internet's most consistently rewarding treasure troves.

LA BELLE, LA PERFECTLY SWELL NOISEUSE — 1

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Part One — The Case For the Prosecution

Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse is a fascinating film and, if you'll pardon the chauvinism, very French.

The psychological insights it serves up are almost unbelievably trite, which makes the grave and serious tone in which they are delivered almost laughable.  But not quite.  It is the préparation of the dish and the présentation which redeem it.  It is a form of alchemy which one often encounters in the simplest French restaurants, where a salade frisée aux lardons will sometimes be put together as though the fate of civilization depends on its approach to perfection.

So in La Belle Noiseuse one appreciates the care and refinement of Rivette's filmmaking, the precision and elegance of the dialogue, even when the ingredients Rivette is working with are simple to the point of simple-mindedness.

One has to be on guard when an artist takes on the subject of how hard it is for a woman to live with an artist.  Self-importance, self-regard and self-pity are almost always hidden among the twists and turns of such works, imperfectly masked by a self-laceration masquerading as humility but in fact presented as a higher form of the artist's noble commitment to honesty, which can apparently justify any human failing.

I don't think I'm misrepresenting Rivette's sensibility here.  He's a guy who once ascribed the success of James Cameron's Titanic to the fact that Kate Winslett was fat, which allowed fat teenage girls to identify with her character.  That same peevish misogyny, that same inability to penetrate the female psyche, are on full display in La Belle Noiseuse.

In La Belle Noiseuse an older artist whose creative springs have run dry is restored to his vocation by a younger woman, for whom he will be tempted to betray his long-suffering wife and partner, even as the younger woman is tempted to betray her love and partnership with an aspiring artist for whom the older man is a mentor and inspiration.  (I should add that the betrayals involved here are not necessarily sexual in the usual sense of that word.)

I am prepared to believe that an older artist can be recalled to productivity by nubile flesh, and that there are women who find the role of muse intoxicating and irresistible at whatever cost it comes.  The phenomenon doesn't tell us much about art, however.  It probably plays itself out in every profession, and there are likely more artists inspired by a faithful lifetime companion than ones revivified by fresh meat.

Such a view, however, has no place in La Belle Noiseuse, where betrayal of a loved one for art must be seen as a tragic, bittersweet necessity — somehow intertwined with the truth of art itself.  The twist at the end of the film's story, while humane on one level, only reinforces this mythology.

La Belle Noiseuse is, to put it very bluntly, nonsense, on a philosophical and psychological level, but it is a measure of the intricate delicacy of Rivette's treatment of this nonsense that one can still enjoy the film as a well-observed melodrama, unfolding with excruciating deliberation, and as an incisive portrait of people in the grip of delusions which the filmmaker himself gives every evidence of sharing.

In Part Two of this piece, I present The Case For the Defense, outlining the film's many miraculous pleasures.