In praise of slow movies: Why this four-hour French drama is worth (a lot of) your time

An attention span is a terrible thing to waste.
These days it seems that people will happily binge a streaming series for hours on end but watching a stand-alone movie running more than 90 minutes is akin to conquering Everest. Roger Ebert famously said, “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough,” a comment that comes down decisively on the side of wholeness in works of art. If something holds our attention, what’s the rush to get it over with?
Ebert — whose reputation as an all-thumbs arbiter of popular taste belies his patience and adventurousness as a critic — was an ardent fan of French director Jacques Rivette’s 237-minute drama “La Belle Noiseuse,” selecting it for his book series “The Great Movies.” He called it “the best film I have ever seen about the physical creation of art.”
The film screens Aug. 18 at the Paradise Theatre as part of programmer Saffron Maeve’s ongoing Contours x MUBI series — spotlighting the intersection of cinema and visual art. While “La Belle Noiseuse” is not exactly obscure — it became a word-of-mouth art-house hit in 1991 after scoring the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival — it would be a mistake to miss the chance to see it theatrically, where its skilful play with duration and stasis casts a beguiling spell. 
Between its slender plot line and judiciously paced sequences of brushes meeting canvas, there is a temptation to call the film “minimalist,” but it’s hardly that. Rather, it is a supremely intimate epic: an exercise in portraiture that steadily and brilliantly deconstructs its own subject matter.
At first, “La Belle Noiseuse” seems to be a study of two couples. While vacationing in Montpellier in the South of France, a young artist, Nicolas (David Bursztein), goes with his beautiful lover, Marianne (Emmanuelle Beárt), to meet with the venerable painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli). The latter is retired: his quiet seclusion in a remote chateau suggests a kind of fairy tale, complete with an ethereal princess in the form of his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin). Liz, who is considerably younger than her husband, used to pose naked for his canvases. Marianne, who is younger still, gets unexpectedly volunteered for the position of muse by Nicolas, a semi-indecent proposal that throws all parties into a state of wary, anxious excitement.
There is a literary source for Rivette’s film — a 19th-century novel by Honoré de Balzac — but the scenario has been styled as a richly cinematic experience, a tour de force of stolen glances and simmering emotions. Piccoli’s effortless gravitas is well deployed for a character who’s quietly sweating his own obsolescence, while Beárt contributes a soul- and body-baring performance as a woman being patiently and methodically objectified in real time.
There are potent subtexts here, touching on themes of aging, esthetics and infidelity. Liz is horrified to see that Frenhofer has literally painted over her image with Marianne’s face and body. Such is the stuff of dissertations, but Rivette, who was maybe the most playful of the firebrand auteurs of the French New Wave, as well as the most wilfully enigmatic, isn’t trying to fix his work’s meanings. Nor is he simply killing time.
Instead, he uses slowness strategically, not to drag the movie out but to open it up, until the scenario of a man and a woman wordlessly cohabiting a studio feels not only dramatically complicated but strangely cosmic.
There’s something to be said for the kind of film that forces a viewer to meet it on its own terms, but at nearly four hours (plus intermission) “La Belle Noiseuse” isn’t an endurance test so much as an invitation to sensual and intellectual pleasure, topped off with an ending that’s very much worth the wait.