It's a film about a painter with the oil-painter's equivalent of writer's block who is inspired to paint again and finish a particular painting after meeting an attractive young woman. He paints her. That's the whole film.
This is the shorter version (2 hour, 5 minutes) of La Belle Noiseuse, which is infamous for being four hours long. A four hour film where nothing happens.
The expression "watching paint dry" explains this whole film.
All this stuff about "a struggle for truth or meaning," "life," "art," "artistic limits," etc. are lies. There's none of that here. They refer to it, mention it once or twice, but that doesn't mean the story deals with this topic in any meaningful way. One could say the story is about Quebec, because they mentioned it once.
Beart is nude in some scenes, but I doubt that people in 2017 will be running to low-resolution VHS/DVD's to watch a 90's actress show some skin for a few minutes. This may have been a selling point in 1991, but we now have real movies and real porn all on this magical thing called "internet."
I'm not against nudity in films if used to further the story. I'm not even against it if used to sell a slower story to a larger audience. But here they try to sell no story whatsoever.
The big curiosity here is the production. This film is based on a Balzac short story, but it has 3 credited writers - the director and two others. The three writers took Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" and Henry James' "The Liar," "The Figure in the Carpet," and "The Aspern Papers," taking something from each, put their 3 heads together and came up with a script in which nothing happens.
The four hour version won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival.
If you really want/have to watch one of these, make it the shorter one.
This is the shorter version (2 hour, 5 minutes) of La Belle Noiseuse, which is infamous for being four hours long. A four hour film where nothing happens.
The expression "watching paint dry" explains this whole film.
All this stuff about "a struggle for truth or meaning," "life," "art," "artistic limits," etc. are lies. There's none of that here. They refer to it, mention it once or twice, but that doesn't mean the story deals with this topic in any meaningful way. One could say the story is about Quebec, because they mentioned it once.
Beart is nude in some scenes, but I doubt that people in 2017 will be running to low-resolution VHS/DVD's to watch a 90's actress show some skin for a few minutes. This may have been a selling point in 1991, but we now have real movies and real porn all on this magical thing called "internet."
I'm not against nudity in films if used to further the story. I'm not even against it if used to sell a slower story to a larger audience. But here they try to sell no story whatsoever.
The big curiosity here is the production. This film is based on a Balzac short story, but it has 3 credited writers - the director and two others. The three writers took Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" and Henry James' "The Liar," "The Figure in the Carpet," and "The Aspern Papers," taking something from each, put their 3 heads together and came up with a script in which nothing happens.
The four hour version won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival.
If you really want/have to watch one of these, make it the shorter one.