This performance is the stuff of legends. Beart was naked for almost two hours of screen time. Unfortunately, it is a four-hour movie, and the other two hours are as dull as a Bob Dole speech. Even Terrence Malick and Tarkovsky would be falling asleep at the slow pacing of this one. Come to think of it, the two hours with naked Beart are also dull, but you don’t notice it as much.
To be fair, the arty set loves this flick. The great Kurosawa, for example, counted it as a favorite, and said he wished he had made it! Both Tuna and I reviewed it decades ago, and suffice it to say we respectfully thought the great Kurosawa was full of it.
Interesting sidebar: the film was not lensed in widescreen, but in TV aspect ratio (4:3)!
Kurosawa said Wha? Any one minute of Kurosawa and Mifune was more exciting than the four hours of this. Cripes, even Last Year at Marienbad was more exciting.
“The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa named it one of his two favorite movies of the 1990s — with Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks – calling it the best filmed display of a struggle of an artist doing his craft, as well as a movie he would have liked to have directed.”
Well, he was a very old man when he said this, and he didn’t even live to see the end of the 1990s, but still …
Good point. He never got to see “The Mummy” or “Notting Hill”.
That made me laugh, but in fairness, he died in 1998 and the very next year is often considered the greatest in the history of cinema.
On the other hand, I doubt if the great master would have appreciated many 1999 films. They were not really his kind of fare.
Remember editing the just the nudity from the VHS tape (full length version). IIRC @ 38 minutes of nudity, but it probably seemed like 2 hrs lol.
Hey, as always, it was essential to her character development! 😛
Shiloh is it possible that you were working from La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento? Jacques Rivette did a reworking of the original film that is only 2 hours 5 minutes, and focuses more on the viewpoint of Beart’s character Marianne. That version would have had a bout 40 minutes of her nude performance.