Michel Piccoli: The Legendary French Actor From ‘La Belle Noiseuse’

It is with great sadness that we learn of Michel Piccoli’s passing today, May 18. An immense actor, Piccoli dies aged 94.

For my series of articles on the Cannes Film Festival, I’ll focus today on a film starring Michel Piccoli, which won the Grand Prix. The film for which he won best actor is unfortunately not available to stream online.

I don’t think there is a single film the French actor starred in where his performance was not outstanding. Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt) brought him fame. He became Luis Bunuel’s favorite actor, starring in five of his films, including Belle de Jour and The Diary of a Chambermaid. Piccoli also starred in many films by French director Claude Sautet, see notably César and Rosalie, with Romy Schneider. He worked with all the greats, such as Jacques Demy, Marco Bellochio, Claude Lelouch, Claude Chabrol, Henri-George Clouzot, Marco Ferreri, Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Ruiz, Leos Carax, and Nanni Moretti. The list could go on.

He won the award for best actor at Cannes in 1980 for Marco Bellochio’s Salto Nel Vuoto (A Leap In the Dark). The screening of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, in which he starred alongside Philippe Noiret and Marcello Mastroianni, created a scandal at the festival in 1973, even though the controversial film went home with the prestigious FRIPRESCI prize. In 1991, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, with Piccoli and Emmanuelle Béart, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

We each have our favorite film in an actor’s career. Mine for Michel Piccoli is his performance as the artist Edouard Frenhofer in La Belle Noiseuse. This is one of the most beautiful films about the nature of art, with a powerful leading actor and actress.

Inspired by a short story written by French author Honoré de Balzac, La Belle Noiseuse tells the story of an artist consumed by his art. ‘La belle Noiseuse’ is the name of a painting Frenhofer has never completed. On holiday in the south of France, Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) and her boyfriend Nicolas (David Bursztein) meet for dinner a local artist, Frenhofer, and his wife Liz (Jane Birkin). After visiting the artist’s studio, left unused for years, Nicolas agrees to let Marianne pose for Frenhofer, without consulting Marianne beforehand. Angry that she was not asked directly, she nonetheless goes to the Frenhofers and becomes Edouard’s model.

La Belle Noiseuse is a little less than four hours long. Much of the film shows Piccoli as Frenhofer painting and discussing his practice with Marianne. The film is a meditation on art as it takes us through the journey the artist Frenhofer takes. This film is about process, the work the artist goes through in order to arrive at a certain point, that point when the painting will be done. It is a long, frustrating process, the film suggests.

Frenhofer’s work consumes him, but as the film shows, it also consumes his model. Marianne seems at first reluctant to be manipulated like a doll, as Frenhofer moves her body into uncomfortable poses to keep for hours on end. It soon turns into a partnership between the painter and the model, to the dismay of Liz, his wife who used to be his model.

Rivette rarely uses close shots in this film, only hands of the artist are shown, cut off from the artist’s body as they work, tracing Marianne’s body on the page. These medium to large shots leave plenty of room for the actors’ performance. Rivette is a director that tries to capture its characters’ performance. Unlike the paintings that we see Frenhofer make, which contorts and cuts the body, the majority of the time, Rivette frames the actors’ whole body. Rivette here contrasts the art of the cinema with that of painting. Rivette’s film, the essence of which is the movement from one image to the next, searches for stillness. Painting, as represented here through Frenhofer’s work, looks for movement, seeking to capture in one image that moment before movement, or further yet, to grab the essence of a moving body in one still image.

La Belle Noiseuse is available to stream on the Criterion Channel. Contempt, La Grande Bouffe, and Belle de Jour are all on Amazon Prime.