Director: Fernando Trueba
Talent: Jean Rochefort, Aida Folch, Claudia Cardinale, Chus Lampreave
Release Date: 13th August 2013
Fernando Trueba’s latest, a collaboration with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, is a throwback to classic French cinema, and romantic ideas about the artistic process. Set in the picturesque south of France during Nazi occupation, the film concerns itself with the relationship between an elderly, disconsolate sculptor, Marc (Jean Rochefort), and a vagrant Spanish girl, Mercé (Aida Folch), by whom he is inspired to work again. Soon it becomes clear that Mercé is not all that she first seemed: she works for the Resistance, helping people to cross the nearby border into her native Spain, endangering the possibility of Marc completing what may be his final work: a lifesize sculpure of her, nude.
Shot in mild black-and-white, The Artist and the Model (the French title is L’artiste et son modèle, denoting possession and implicit power relations absent from its English translation) is as much a film about the occupation of France as it is the occupation of a young woman’s body for the purpose of producing sculpture. The clunky irony of lines such as: ‘Artists have a right to see women naked! Artists and doctors!’ satirise such macho attitudes, and it is surely no accident that it is a Nazi officer (and, we’re told, professor of art history: Marc’s biographer), in full regalia, who holds the abdomen of an unfinished, broken sculpture and marvels: ‘Ah, the female body!’ — but it is clear that Trueba and Carrière, proto-feminist concessions aside, have great affection for the subjects they ironise. Indeed, the film’s central drama relies on our sympathy for both Mercé and Marc, the subject and the artist, and our complicity in the reification of that power dynamic.
It is a truism that every period piece belongs to the time in which it is written as well as that in which it is set, but it is hard to determine what exactly The Artist and the Model has to say about 1943, or how a viewer in 2013 is expected to respond to its gentle ambivalence towards what is essentially a predatory, unequal relationship, played out as pure inspiration. Mercé’s initial discomfort with posing naked is treated brusquely, and the film progresses — perhaps appropriately for one quite literally about objectification, in sculpture — to revel in her nudity, both in fragmented close-ups and soft-focus mid-shots, for as long as possible before the constraints of being a narrative feature kick in. But Carrière has nothing new to say about the Nazi occupation, sculpture, or objectification, and the insistent banality of Trueba’s visual style lends the subject no depth or excitement: the film takes its cues from received wisdom about art, while treating its female lead as though she were a statue already. Marc’s jealousy of Mercé’s emergent relationship with a wounded resistance fighter (Martin Gamet) hints at a repressed sexual longing which is to be realised in the film’s closing sequence, in terms ostensibly intended to be melancholic and bittersweet. If you’re waiting for any disavowal or problematisation of the paternalistic, exploitative thread running through the narrative, you’ve come to the wrong place: this is 1943, after all!
‘They’re bombing Rome,’ reports Marc, sadly. ‘They must never have heard of Michelangelo.’ Trueba’s film, in conceiving of its titular model as merely a caryatid to her artist-cum-patron’s greatness, makes a cogent argument for bombing the past entirely, or at least the one it chooses to sculpt.
