film that
takes you into a lair where the power of creation takes precedence over
everything else.
Even if The
Beautiful Troublemaker sometimes takes on the air of vaudeville, of broken
romance (magnificent couple, that of Edouard and Liz), it is more the weight of
the art on the artist than of the artist on the art that feeds the sap of the
film.
Long by its
duration, disconcerting by its rhythm that lets itself wander under the heat of
summer, the sound of the pencil against the canvas and the various strolls in
this bucolic and bourgeois decorum to wish, the beautiful troubelmaker is a
monster with two heads, those of Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Béart. He’s the
painter, and she’s the model. Except that over the course of working hours,
everyone’s status will decline or evolve to take the place of the other. He
appears as the devouring, destructive and Machiavellian wolf and she, the
sheep, tender and ready to be devoured by her executioner to whom she shows her
intimacy. Creation is the key word, the very thread of the work: both in its
filmic material, with its long sequences of painting, and by its themes that
derive as much in the theoretical as in the organic.
His many
strokes of pencil or brush, his many minutes of bickering and dark discord to
find the right position of the naked model, the time it takes to find a
complementarity, the doubts of the characters as to the value of this painting,
an artistic look at the dominant/dominated aspect during the artistic
conception or even the questioning of each one as to their role in this
creative process. Because even if the film questions the role of creation in a
life, the work of memory or even in a couple, watching closely the devotion of
Man for his art and the capacity of the latter to immerse body and soul in this
almost divine addiction, it is above all the process and the back of the set
that obsess the camera of Jacques Rivette and the scenario of Pascal Bonitzer.
A camera,
which behind the sensuality of the frame and the attraction emanated by the
naked body of Emmanuel Béart never falls into the trap of voyeurism but on the
contrary, fascinates with an approach that always remains artistic. Rivette’s
camera, especially in the studio scenes, never sexualizes Emmanuelle Béart’s body.
The image takes the pulse of the painter Edouard, as cowardly as he is
governing, neutral as he is fascinated, materialistic as he is human,
tyrannical as he is desperately troubled and fragile. It is this fragility and
ambiguity in the pattern of invention which, in this timeless bubble that is
the creative workshop, see the birth of this special relationship between the
two characters and their mutual exposure, in the proper sense as well as in the
figurative sense.
The more the
minutes advance, the greater the suspense around the completion of the
painting. However, the more the sketches abound, the more blood and tears flow,
the more the trials multiply and the more the result of creation becomes
secondary, to be overcome by the Grail that the two protagonists seek: a
freedom of mind and flesh, a tranquility of memory and a free will
superimposing art on everyday life like this famous «No» frowning and sneering
of Marianne to her lover Nicolas. Like his character, Jacques Rivette makes his
film an immense painting, imperfect but overflowing with generosity and
obstinacy on the transcendence of the Human and his own creative power.
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