Coincidence-or is it one of those persistent fin-de-siecle themes?-has brought two superb films about artists to the marketplace at the same moment. One, David Cronenberg`s ”Naked Lunch” (currently at the Esquire and the Broadway), is a Canadian-British co-production that takes its themes from the life and work of American novelist William S. Burroughs, one of the defining figures of modern fiction.
The other, Jacques Rivette`s ”La Belle Noiseuse” (which opened Friday for a limited run at the Music Box Theater), is a four-hour French film centered on the painful creative collaboration between a painter and a model. Though the film is set in the present, Rivette`s source is an 1837 short story by Balzac, a text that amounts to a manifesto of 19th Century romanticism.
To pass between these two films is to pass between two diametrically opposed concepts of art and the psychology of the artist, which together suggest how great the gap was between 19th and 20th Century culture, and how great the gap continues to be between North American and European notions of creativity.
The set-up in both films is remarkably similar. Rivette`s Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is a once-celebrated painter who has largely lost interest in his work, following his failure, 10 years before, to complete a project entitled ”La Belle Noiseuse” (”The Beautiful Annoyance,” in rough translation), which might have been his masterpiece.
But when Frenhofer meets Marianne (Emmanuelle Beart), a darkly sensual young woman who is the lover of an admiring fellow artist, he suddenly feels able to take up ”La Belle Noiseuse” again, using Marianne as his model instead of his British wife Liz (Jane Birkin), who posed for the abandoned original.
The protagonist of ”Naked Lunch” is Bill Lee (played by a marvelously dyspeptic Peter Weller), an erstwhile writer who has decided that art is too dangerous a profession, and has thus gone into deep cover as a professional exterminator in New York City, circa 1953.
Bill has a muse, too, though a more problematic one: His wife Joan (Judy Davis) is a pale, sarcastic presence who sits at home all day, injecting Bill`s precious bug powder into her veins (it`s a Kafkaesque high, she explains-it makes her feel like a cockroach).
Bill`s inspiration to write again comes in the wake of a grotesque accident-his famous ”William Tell routine” with Joan has gone wrong, and instead of shooting a glass balanced on her head he has placed a bullet right between her eyes.
Or at least, Bill seems to be writing again; Cronenberg doesn`t tell us for sure. In the world of ”Naked Lunch,” the creative act is one of ultimate shame and furtiveness, subject to even more censure than the drug-addiction and homosexuality that number among Bill`s other proclivities.
Writing is the one obscenity in ”Naked Lunch” that cannot be shown or admitted to. Bill can only compose his book by imagining, in a drug-induced hallucination, that he has traveled to a mysterious North African country called ”Interzone,” where he is to file intelligence reports for a sinister international, and perhaps intergalactic, cartel.
In ”La Belle Noiseuse,” art is a reaching out, an attempt to detect and seize an essential truth in the outside world. Inducing the reluctant Marianne to pose nude for him, Frenhofer brutally manipulates her body, placing her in increasingly tortured positions, as if pain would make the truth of her character and experience emerge from the muscle and bone of her body.
But for David Cronenberg in ”Naked Lunch,” art is a retreat into a world of fantasy and stylization, where pain can be avoided, displaced and projected onto something else. Adrift in Interzone, Bill meets Joan Frost
(Davis, again), the Jane Bowles-ish wife of Paul Bowles-ish novelist Tom Frost (Ian Holm).
That the two Joans are identical (and that the Frosts seem to be living in a vaguely Africanized version of the Lee`s New York apartment) is a fact that the film never acknowledges. Bill simply picks up with the fantasy figure where he left off with reality, and even seems-endearingly-determined to do better this time and love this hallucination more than he loved his late wife. In Rivette`s film, creativity is driven by desire-by the barely sublimated eroticism in the painter`s seduction of his model and-later, when the tables in the power relationship have turned-by Marianne`s desire to wholly occupy Frenhofer, to draw all of his genius from him.
The dialogue speaks of painting in frankly orgasmic turns-as Frenhofer`s desire to create ”whirlwinds,” ”maelstroms,” ”cataclysms”-and his muse is radiantly healthy and alive.
For Cronenberg, however, creation results from fear. It is both a warding off of death and an imitation of it, as are Bill`s addictions to a barren sex and drug-induced pleasure. Art is something achieved in a state of blackout, of forgetfulness: Bill is astounded to discover that he has been sending chapters of a novel titled ”Naked Lunch” to two writer friends, who have arranged to have it published. Looking through the typescript, he recognizes none of it as his own.
With her cadaverous pallor and purple lips, the first Joan is a classical personification of death, a figure out of mythology with an ironic modern twist, like the death angel in the black limousine of Jean Cocteau`s
”Orphee.”
Addicted to the death-dealing bug powder, she generates one of the film`s biggest laughs by breathing on a cockroach which, after staggering for a precisely timed moment, falls stiff to the floor.
Joan II is marginally more generous and supportive, allowing Bill the use of her husband`s Arabic typewriter-a sinister machine that grows a phallic appendage when its keys are stroked. When Bill and Joan have sex, the typewriter joins them, turning into a scurrying creature that Cronenberg in his interviews has called a ”sex blob.” Climax achieved, the creature flings itself out a window and dies.
There is no consummated sex in ”La Belle Noiseuse,” though there is a great deal of nudity as Marianne goes through her poses for Frenhofer-enough so that some feminist critics have charged the film with exploiting women.
It is, however, by no means clear who has the upper hand in the relationship, and the process becomes one of collaboration and competition.
The lovemaking metaphor is never far away for Rivette, but if he compares creativity to sexuality, it is to emphasize its shared, spontaneous nature. It is not something that happens exclusively in the mind of the artist, as it is for Cronenberg, but something that results from specific interactions in a specific physical space.
It`s a difference that is registered most subtly in the two films`
respective visual styles. Rivette emphasizes the integrity and continuousness of the space before his camera, using deep focus compositions to preserve the actors` precise physical relations to each other and frequently placing windows and doorways in the background of his shots, as a way of showing that the world continues beyond the frame of an individual shot-and far beyond the film itself.
By the end of ”La Belle Noiseuse,” the viewer has the sense of knowing every inch of Frenhofer`s chateau and the exact layout of its every room and garden.
Cronenberg, however, creates a wholly artificial space, through editing that obscures the spatial relationships between shots as well as stylized, forthrightly theatrical sets (”Interzone” was created entirely on a Toronto sound stage).
This is not a real world, but the interior, mental landscape that Bill Lee carries around with him-his refuge, the hiding place he has created for himself. There are no warm bodies here, but only words, words, words-the writer trapped within himself.
Seen through the romantic sensibility of ”La Belle Noiseuse,” the world will always hold a mystery and challenge for the artist, dangling the promise of transcendent truth to be seized.
But in the modernist terms of Burroughs and Cronenberg, truth is just one more illusion, a hallucination among a hundred others.
