By Christopher Morris

A question for the ages: Where does art come from? First, there is nothing, and then, suddenly, without suggestion or provocation, inspiration strikes: the idea appears. Although the idea has to be manipulated -- hammered flat, reproportioned, inverted, exploded into pieces -- before it’s turned, finally, into something recognizable as art, this is the grunt work, the 99% perspiration. The idea itself stands apart from this, a divine blessing, elusive and lightning-quick, as subtle as Maxwell and his silver hammer. First nothing, then something. How does this happen?

Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is a painter intimately familiar with inspiration, or rather the lack of it. He was once a renowned artist, full of energy and ideas. Now he is slow, silver-haired, living with his wife in a castle-like enclave in the south of France. When he still summons the energy to paint, which is not often, it’s in the service of a series of inert self-portraits, mirrors upon mirrors, reflecting the contempt he directs at them. Lifeless, washed up, irrelevant, those paintings embody his worst fears about himself. Once upon a time, a decade ago, Frenhofer hoped to complete his masterpiece, a painting that summed up in a single image all he knew about life. Drafts of this painting, called La Belle Noiseuse, were conceived using his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), as a model. But the work, like so much of Frenhofer’s life -- like Liz herself -- now stands ignored and abandoned, a canvas turned to face the wall.

Enter Nicolas (David Bursztein), a morose, acclaimed young painter who admires Frenhofer’s work. With his girlfriend, Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), in tow, Nicolas has traveled from afar to meet the great man and to investigate the machinery of stalled ambition -- what happened here? But it’s Marianne, the innocent bystander, who sets things into motion: through no fault of her own, she awakens Frenhofer’s torpid artistic inclinations, and becomes his inspiration, his reluctant muse. First there was nothing, now there is something. And none of the four will ever be the same.

Director Jacques Rivette chooses not to directly address the psychological aspects of artistic conception and labor, instead focusing on the birth itself: long, stationary sequences devoted to the process of creation. The camera stares as Frenhofer slowly clears his work space and arranges his tools. Then, in marvelous real-time, it peeks over his shoulder as he takes his first artistic steps: there is the blank page, and then the first stroke, the second, the third . . . more strokes follow, and slowly the vision begins to emerge. This is done in near-silence, the only sound that of the pen scratching its ink into the paper.

In sequential days, Frenhofer attacks his canvases. Marianne, the model, is unnerved by the rules of this game: she must be nude, she must contort her body in impossible positions, and, above all, she must hold still, for hours on end, enduring absurd amounts of eye-glazing boredom. He is brusque with her and makes clear that any consideration for her needs is irrelevant. (Consideration for his own needs, he tells her, is equally irrelevant. Only the needs of the painting matter.) In approach after approach, Frenhofer tries new tactics, new mediums, plainly looking for something, but the viewer is never sure what it is -- when asked, Frenhofer himself assures us that he has no idea, either; he’ll know it, one guesses, when he sees it. Inevitably, inspiration starts to lag, and Marianne’s awkwardness gives way to a new kind of confidence -- she’ll take charge, if she needs to, to see this project to completion.

Into this fury of creation come the messy quotidian demands of human relationships. Art is indeed a jealous mistress, as Emerson said, but that works two ways: Others can be jealous of it, too. Nicolas, Marianne’s boyfriend, is troubled by her devotion to Frenhofer and his masterpiece: Are these signs of a deeper, more troubling affection? And Liz, Frenhofer’s wife and first model, worries that in replacing Liz with Marianne the artist is editing her out of his life as well. On all sides Frenhofer is beset with people who want to influence the artistic process and, ultimately, the masterpiece itself. But who’s in charge here? Is it the artist’s responsibility to create the canvas he alone wants? Or should he create what others -- his audience -- want him to? And what of the model, the inspiration -- how should she feel about the work? Is she a bystander or a participant in its creation?

Jacques Rivette’s four-hour masterpiece is a marvel of controlled storytelling. Through the interdependencies of two characters and their doppelgangers -- the old painter and the new, the old model and the new -- he produces a simple, inexorable fugue of complex human interaction. Rivette was one of the central participants in the original French New Wave, whose previous films were notable for their playful, realistic eccentricity. He doesn’t jettison these qualities for La Belle Noiseuse; instead he tones them down, aiming, like Frenhofer himself, for a more serious and profound truth.

As Frenhofer, Piccoli masterfully portrays the befuddled artist, hollowed out and then refilled by art. (The close-ups of painting and sketching, it should be noted, are performed by artist Bernard Dufour.) And Béart, whose beauty is buoyed by large, fierce eyes, gives a brave performance and supplies the film with its emotional electricity.

Yes, the movie is slow. (Real life is slow, what can I say?) And yes, it’s four hours long. Surprisingly, no scene is too long, and nothing is extraneous; in fact, rarely in my experience has a four-hour film seemed so tight, so concise. I know there are those -- and you know who you are -- for whom a long French film on the nature of art will never be anything but an exercise in wrist-slitting tedium. But for anyone interested at all in art and the underlying mechanics of its creation, Rivette’s epic is well worth the effort, a high water mark in contemporary French cinema.