The Artist and the Model

8/10/2024

Jean Rochefort and Aida Foch present quite an unique sort of love story here as he ("Cros") invites her ("Mercè") to sit for him as a muse for his sculpture. They met because his wife "Léa" (Claudia Cardinale) encountered the girl fleeing from the Nazis in the occupied part of France. She is aspiring to make it back home to Spain, bit is weak and penniless. As she poses for the elderly man, they enquire much of each other and begin to develop a bond that is entirely complementary to his marriage, but provides him with a long lost, invigorated, inspiration to create something beautiful from his block of marble. It's a slow burn, this, but somehow it manages to create a perfect framework for an evaluation of age, certainly, but also of beauty too. A beauty that is reflected on a more viscera