Dir. Jacques Rivette, 1991, 238 min
With Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Béart, Marianne Denicourt
In French, Hebrew, and English with English subtitles

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker in English) is legendary French New Wave director Jacques Rivette’s epic exploration of the convergence between artistry and eroticism.

Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is a reclusive painter living in the French countryside with his wife (French cultural icon Jane Birkin). Their lives are radically upended with the arrival of a younger artist (David Bursztein) and his girlfriend (Emmanuel Béart), who becomes the muse that awakens Edouard’s fading passions.

This layered character study, based on The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac, simultaneously offers one of the most incisive and immersive meditations on the creative process ever produced on film.

“Hypnotically beautiful.” — The New York Times