Giving the lie to Tebbit

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 September

The poster for The Artist and the Model (2012) makes you hesitate - the shapely back cannot be that of Claudia Cardinale, unless it is a re-release...

The film is not, of course, about looking at Aida Folch's body (as Mercè), but about discovery, for, when we first see Marc Clos (Jean Rochefort), he is contemplating what looks like it could be a modernist maquette of a female form. He picks it up, looks at it, rejects it by throwing it down, and going on to look at a fish's head, a tree, all of which subliminally conveys the message that he will know a form when he sees it, and that it will arise organically.

Veteran actor Rochefort (The Hairdresser's Husband (1990)), at 83, has all the class to be Clos, to be believable as a man who poetically talking about creation, about woman, life, and whom we see working on sketches, painting, models with Folch as his muse - at a key moment, she is delighting in being seen, in being the spark of his energy, and cannot but smile. The film is essentially between Clos and untutored Mercè, and, in a preceding scene, he unfolds a Rembrandt sketch to her, and she begins to interpret what she first just calls 'joli[e]', and he says that she is not looking - he tells her how it was made, when, and what it means to him, and he awakens her.

Cardinale (Léa), though, discovers Mercè at the outset : having been his model, and still beautiful herself, she knows what feminine appearance in Mercè will provide Marc with good poses, and we see her learning how to adopt a pose for Marc, resume one, be a source not of sexual attraction, but of beauty.

With only hints of coloration when the film begins (and ends), it is otherwise in black and white, and this, along with a soundtrack of birdsong, the sounds of insects and leaves, heightens the attention on form, line, texture, and shape in Mercè's body. We utterly believe that Rochefort is an artist who is friends with Matisee, that he is sketching, applying clay, smoothing surfaces, as we watch, which is part of his own malleability as a cinematic artist.

Inevitably, one thinks of other films with a relation to art and to connections between the artist and others, such as Conversations with my Gardener (2007), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), and Scorsese's Life Lessons from New York Stories (1989), of which Nick Nolte is most compelling with the physicality of his large canvas, and Daniel Auteuil, with his gentle and humane observations and how he shares about life, love and art, whereas Derek Jakobi (as Bacon) shows us conflict between artist and model.

None of those quite compares to this portrait of Clos, although there are similarities to Auteuil as artist, and care has been taken (with Hockney as one of the advisers) to make everything as believable and realistic as possible in an immensely beautiful film.


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge) If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here