We
first see Cros as he comes strolling in his grounds with a stick,
picking up twisted twigs and things, not cleaning, just signaling that
he is not presently engaged in much. Then we see his wife (played by
the former luminary Claudia Cardinale) and maid in the nearby town.
They discover a girl sleeping in a doorway, take her home and feed her,
and learn that she is a fugitive from a refugee camp. The wife, who is
a former model herself, sees at a glance that this girl, Mercè, has the
sort of skin that her husband likes in models. One glance at Mercè by
Cros confirms this.
In the studio, quickly convinced by Cros that she is not being
inveigled, Mercè strips, and we enter this special world of nudity. It
isn’t sexual; but it isn’t, of course, normal. It is a particular
privileged area between them. He sets to work at once making charcoal
sketches. Then, through the weeks, come figures, even an oil painting
of Mercè bathing. Cros is searching for something that he is not yet
sure of. We note that it is a sculptor’s basic task to make hard
materials look soft.
While he works, licensed perhaps by this privacy and attuned to his
searching work, Cros delivers grand pronouncements about life, often
including the word “God.” We take these comments as part of his
process. He is nearing completion of a kneeling figure of her.
One day, when she has been allowed to stroll about, she discovers a
young man burying another young man. Both were escapees from that
refugee camp, and the other man was killed. Mercè takes the surviving
refugee back to Cros, who shelters him. Then a German army officer
visits. When he and Cros meet, they embrace. The officer, in peacetime,
was a professor of art history in a German university and is writing a
book about Cros. He has come for more information. When he leaves, he
tells Cros, who is of course an old friend, that he expects to be sent
to the Russian front, a stroke of doom. He and Cros embrace and part.
Then comes the need to help the refugee escape. Mercè helps. Cros
supplies money. Mercè, her modeling done, wants to go. She and Cros do
come to one moment of intimacy, but it is in the nature of farewell.
She will bicycle to Marseilles if Cros will give her his bicycle, and
we last see her biking away. Cros is left alone in his studio. He gives
a final touch to the kneeling figure of Mercè. Then he concludes the
film—concludes everything. It is his closing statement.
This film has its own nature, almost its own reality. It is as if some
gifted people got together to make it, then arranged some themes in and
around the gleaming box of that private nudity. The sudden finish
almost seems meant to make it our responsibility to comprehend the
whole.
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