The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

This film is just unbearable to watch for 4 hours unless you are a pretentious, arty farty w....ker who thinks it is cool because it is about an artist. The only good thing about the film is the long scenes of the beautiful young naked woman. The wanky reviewers who rave about this just don't realise that subconsciously the only good thing about this film is the nudity.

Jacques Rivette's four-hour masterpiece 'La Belle Noiseuse' is a brilliant adaptation of Balzac's famous short story 'Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu' (The Unknown Masterpiece). Both are quite different in their approaches, yet both effectively demonstrate the struggles of an artist's perfectionism and contain good philosophical musings on the nature of art. Highly recommend both. Excellent casting as well. I especially liked the choice of Jane Birkin as the ageing muse.

The former famous painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) revisits an abandoned project using the girlfriend (Emmanuelle Béart) of a young visiting artist. Questions about truth, life, and artistic limits are explored.The film is loosely adapted from the short story "The Unknown Masterpiece" by Honoré de Balzac and also includes elements from "The Liar", "The Figure in the Carpet", and "The Aspern Papers" by Henry James. One does not need to have read any of these works to appreciate the film, however.Some critics say the film is like watching paint dry, because very little happens and it has a running time of over four hours! But, at the same time ,this is sort of its charm. It just goes slow, unfolding, and getting the job done. Is the story of the artist or the model? Do they grow together, or grow apart?

La Belle Noiseuse is exactly what Americans fear when someone suggests that we watch foreign films. When we are hanging out with our friends, enjoying a few rounds of Bud Light and pontificating about the boring European films we've never seen, this is the movie we are imagining.That's right, folks, I'm talking about four hours of French people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while a frustrated painter tries to get his groove back by making rough sketches of a model and pondering the willful personality of a painting that doesn't exist.As if that wasn't bad enough, there are dozens of shots of a beautiful naked woman being manually contorted, like Gumby, while not having sex. It is morally reprehensible for a movie to show so much nakedness yet so little nookie. In exchange for taking the risk of our children accidentally seeing this and turning into nudists, or something equally horrific (cappuccino-sipping art house snobs), we deserve the highest possible return.Unfortunately, most of La Belle Noiseuse takes place in one location. That's just not how a movie is supposed to be. If we want to look at the same house for hours, we can do that without renting movies. We like The Shining, 12 Angry Men, and Phone Booth, but those are American movies for mass consumption, not French "hipster chow" for snotty college students. If we are going to put up with watching foreigners doing artsy stuff, we should at least get a decent tour.So if you want to spend all day watching the same thing happening over and over again in the same place, with occasional dramatic interruptions, then suit yourself. But as far as I am concerned…well, now that I think about it, that sounds a lot like NASCAR. Maybe it's not such a bad movie after all.(NOTE: Let not the sarcasm be lost.)