The Artist and the Model

The Artist and the Model

An unassuming, direct movie about the mystery of our world. It does so mainly by looking fixedly at beautiful or beautifully arranged things in sunlight and making us share its sense of wonder. “You can’t create this light,” says the artist of the title, looking past his canvas at his nude model standing in a field where drifting pollen, shifting clouds, swaying branches and fluttering leaves lend it a fidgety, flickering quality. He tries to reproduce it with dappled, mottled, uneven applications of paint.

The same edgy light falls on the canvas and on the painter’s magisterially aged face. Everywhere is beauty. Even yes a Nazi officer in full Reich regalia at one point. This is not common nowadays: a movie that looks gorgeous all over and all through itself too. Director Fernando Trueba and his screenwriter, Jean Claude Carrière (the legendary collaborator on six films by Luis Buñuel), are almost making an essay out of “The Artist and the Model.”

They seem to be saying that there is no such thing as mere surface when it comes to people; that eyes, faces and body language give away histories and inner lives; if only we were ready and able to see what was really there. Trueba aims for elemental truths here; universal pleasures also.

After his wife Lea (Claudia Cardinale) sees a glowing Spanish beauty bathing in a fountain, reclusive French painter-sculptor Marc Cros (Jean Rochefort) hires the slim waif, Mercè (Aida Folch) to model for his latest sculpture. It’s 1943 in occupied France, and Cros hasn’t worked at his country studio since the start of the war. The girl turns out to be an escapee from a prison camp who helps resistance fighters cross over into Spain.

These plot points are handled with elegant efficiency by the film, though they are about as interesting to Trueba as they are to Cros; Cros’ philosophy of war might be summed up by something Francois Truffaut once wrote in response to complaints that he had abandoned political reality in his work: “During troubled periods the artist hesitates.

He is tempted to abandon his art and make it subservient to an idea. Through movies he becomes a propagandist. Whenever I think this way I remember Matisse. He lived through three wars unscathed. He was too young for 1870, too old for 1914, an elder statesman in 1940. He died in 1954 between the wars in Indochina and Algeria having finished his life’s work, his fish, women, flowers, landscapes framed by windows. The wars were minor events in his life.”

In fact, Cros does pursue an “idea” but not in the cheap sense that Truffaut meant it; like Matisse, referred to as a friend of our fictional hero here, he is subservient only to the pursuit of some essential idea which sheds light on all life indeed even more so than Matisse: every work involves making women its subject matter; these savages persecuting one another politically a few miles from their cabin doorstep amount merely background noise to women in repose of which he says that only two things confirm the existence of God; his paintings and sculptures being a testament to the “first thing.”

“The Artist and the Model” is an arthouse film in the tradition of old American grindhouse distributors who dabbled in Euro cinema: its female protagonist spends about 70% of her screen time naked. The camera worships every curve.

An obligatory gang of neighborhood kids climb up the sloping forest hills to get a peep at the nude model, later get smacked around by an officious priest out of Fellini and Bunuel, various scenes end with tidy one-liners and winsome smiles: these conventions give it shape as lazily pleasing as Folch’s, but a sublime scene midway invites us to take ostensibly stock situations longer deeper look Cros analyzes a simple Rembrandt sketch which he calls greatest picture ever made.

Cros’ description of the work is one most eloquent passionate visual essays on art, imagination compassion that I have ever encountered; it can also plays as an admonishment against modern Twitterized world where even major artists have become resigned themselves before splintered glancing dehumanizing gaze dominates everything.

After that the film gets more and more beautiful, expressing its ideas through the simplest moving images. Each time Cros tries harder and harder, he has toiled on a sketch which was then crossed out; he has wasted clay on a model which was then dumped anything to find his big statement. He goes round to see his neighbour, a marble sculptor who makes tombstones for the most part, to check how things are going with his own tombstone. He is running out of time.

With a wounded Spanish resistance fighter Mercè’s relationship looks pretty feeble compared with Cros’s essentially religious quest. When he realizes that Mercè is more open-minded about his odd methods this time around, he attempts further self-justification by retelling the story of Adam and Eve in what sounds like an even more chauvinist light than the Old Testament version did. In God’s reimagining it was Adam who formed Eve as his perfect companion; according to Rochefort though what Trueba and Carriere mean becomes clear here too women are primary creations while men serve only utilitarian purposes.

This wide eyed philosophy is best expressed when Cros tells Mercè how beautiful his wife’s body used to be at her age: “She had the prettiest body I have ever seen. She’d take off her clothes and there it all was!” And since Claudia Cardinale plays the wife whose being there has been recorded in films for years now; whose warm smile still lights up any screen she appears on but whose bright mischievous eyes continue twinkling away at 75 this year alone well we believe him don’t we?

Watch The Artist and the Model For Free On Gomovies.