La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento

Frenhofer is an old painter who has hardly painted anything for years. He lives with his wife Liz in a large house in the country. An acquaintance brings the young painter Nicolas and his lover Marianne to the house. Frenhofer remembers a canvas he abandoned ten years earlier and asks Marianne to sit for him. What follows takes place in the studio, with the making of the painting shown step by step. A contest of wills builds between the painter and his model. Nicolas’s jealousy and Liz’s misgivings are added to it. This version is not simply a shortened cut; Rivette re-edited the same footage to tell the thing more from Marianne’s side. Emmanuelle Béart and Michel Piccoli appear in Jacques Rivette’s French film of 1992.