Jean Rochefort is now 83, with a résumé of more than 150 films to his credit. Many of them are great — The Clockmaker of St. Paul, The Phantom of Liberty, Man on the Train — but it may be that it’s taken him five decades to contribute his defining role.
In Fernando Trueba’s The Artist and the Model, a twilight sonata of passion and frustration both artistic and sexual, Rochefort’s wily intelligence and world-weary cynicism are a perfect match for Marc Cros, an aging and uninspired sculptor of nude models living in Nazi-occupied France.
Whether discussing the horrors of war or people-watching from a café, he looks at the universe through jaundiced eyes, like he’s seen everything — until he lays his gaze on Mercè, the unassumingly beautiful young Spanish refugee from across the border, who is discovered by Marc’s wife Léa (Claudia Cardinale) bathing her bruised legs in a public fountain.
She’s quite a breath of exotic air. “You’re just his type,” says Léa, jettisoning jealousy for the hope that her artistically blocked husband may finally be able to sculpt again. So the young girl agrees to pose nude for Marc, in return for a paycheck and room and board in the artist’s studio.
Mercè is played by the Spanish actress Aida Folch, and as a performer, she’s every bit Rochefort’s equal. She’s introduced like Truffaut’s wild child: a ravenous, nervous and uncouth creature born from nature, who doesn’t eat like a civilized Frenchwoman, let alone possess an understanding of art.
In one of her first jobs posing for Marc, in a sun-dappled lake, she drops her position, goes for a short swim, clutches a fish and flings it at Marc’s feet in a juvenile prank. He’s unfazed by her actions, and she quickly tries to regain her pose, her laughter congealing into a serious expression. It’s one of the funniest scenes in any movie all year, sold by expert actors playing off each other’s opposing tones.
But the meat of The Artist and the Model captures the titular characters at work in the studio, with Marc sketching, erasing, re-drawing and plastering potential positions in his quest for the perfect piece of art, and Mercè adopting countless poses. Folch has the sort of curvy figure the Old Masters would have loved, and it’s easy to see why Marc becomes so enraptured. It’s hard not to think of Rochefort as Trueba’s on-screen surrogate; just as Marc draws and then sculpts every inch of her anatomy, so too does Trueba’s camera catalog her body in luminous widescreen black-and-white.
And yet, The Artist and the Model is never (intentionally) titillating or exploitative — nor is it ever manipulative, with the film’s lack of musical cues enhancing the credibility of its most tender moments. It’s far more high-minded than such commercial concerns, becoming a meditation on the artistic process and in particular the duality of nude modeling.
By the dictates of her job, Mercè must act as both subject and object. She’s both a person to whom Marc is increasingly drawn and the still-life image he’s re-creating. Artistic distance and emotional closeness wrestle in Marc’s psyche, and you can see the results all over Rochefort’s rough countenance and leathery hands. The future of his character’s masterpiece depends on his ability to reconcile these opposites.
The movie drags a little when integrating a supporting character — an injured soldier, whom Mercè finds and hides away in Marc’s studio — partly because the World War II setting is an almost nostalgic red herring; it’s beside the movie’s main point. This is a film about seeing beyond the surfaces of things. Just like the Rembrandt drawing Marc analyzes with Mercè in an impromptu, beautifully presented art lesson, it transcends its time and place.
THE ARTIST AND THE MODEL; Director: Fernando Trueba; Cast: Jean Rochefort, Aida Folch, Claudia Cardinale, Chus Lampreave, Gotz Otto; Distributor: Cohen; In French with English subtitles; opens Friday at Regal Delray Beach 18, Regal Shadowood 16 in Boca Raton, Sunrise 11 in Sunrise and the MDC Koubec Theater in Miami. It opens Sept. 6 at Movies of Delray and Movies of Lake Worth.