La revière gentille

I could spend all day watching Louise Bourgeois talk and sketch and mold and recollect. This grande dame of the art world is six kinds of fascinating when performing for a camera, especially when at work on her objects, drawings and paintings, but equally through her intensity and nuance of voice, pose and gesture.
Or so I thought after seeing “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine,” the superb documentary portrait that closed on Tuesday at Film Forum in Manhattan. Now arrives “La Rivière Gentille,” one of three feature-length portraits by the filmmaker Brigitte Cornand that are screening at Anthology Film Archives and that afford, if not a whole day, at least an exceedingly long afternoon in the company of Ms. Bourgeois. (This 96-year-old artist is the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum that runs through Sept. 28.)
“The Sweet River,” as the title translates, is not a film that seeks to explain or profile a seminal contemporary artist. It is more of an extended, free-form, rather enervated home movie culled from Ms. Cornand’s extensive visits to Ms. Bourgeois’s ramshackle Chelsea apartment.
Long sequences eavesdrop as Ms. Cornand reads aloud from books (a monograph on 17th-century textiles, evocative definitions of the word rebus). Less but more rewarding attention is paid to the completion of a watercolor and the recitation of a Bourgeois-composed quatrain. The film seems vaguely to murmur, “Wish you were here,” while proving that if all footage of geniuses has value, value fluctuates, and that geniuses, only human after all, are quite capable of boring your socks off.
Da The New York Times, 9 Luglio 2008