Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2009

[Chris Knipp]

MARTIN PROVOST: SERAPHINE (2008)


YOLANDE MOREAU, ULRICH TUKUR

A visionary artist, her sometime mentor, and her sad decline

Veteran actress Yolande Moreau gives a dedicated performance in this biopic about the neo-primitive, or "naive," or "outsider" or "visionary" flower painter Srraphine Louis (1864-1948), now called Seraphine de Senlis, from the town where she worked. An orphan looked down on by all, she survived, barely, by doing cleaning and laundry paid by the job, but in her little room in town at night by candlelight made strange, visionary paintings of flowers in large clusters, looking like diamonds or insects. Raised and cared for in early life by nuns, she sang to the Virgin when she finished a painting. Beautifully photographed, meditative, with a strong sense of the quietude of rural France in the teens and twenties, this picture doesn't provide deep insight into either Seraphine or the German art collector who discovered and supported her, Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur, another veteran; he has one of the secondary leads in The Lives of Others). Uhde deserves his own biopic. He was the first to purchase the works of Picasso and discovered the great modern primitive Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau.

Slowly, methodically, the film shows how Uhde finds out by chance that the haggard-looking, middle-aged woman cleaning up in the big house he's renting in Senlis with his sister is doing unique paintings on wood. Nobody else around appreciates them or, in fact, understands modern art. He buys all her work from Seraphine and urges her to concentrate on her art. But WWI comes, and as a German he is forced to leave precipitously, leaving behind his little notebook and most of the art he's collected in France.

Uhde returns years later with his sister and also a male lover, Helmut Kolle (Nico Rogner), a talented young German expressionist painter dying of TB, and rents another house in the area. Once again he comes across Seraphine's work and finds it more ambitious and much more brilliant. He puts her on a generous monthly stipend. She shows signs of mania, and her disappointment when she finds the Paris exhibition she's been promised must be put off due to the worldwide financial crisis leads her into insanity. The trajectory is ever downward, though the final scenes suggest that her last years in a sanatorium may have been spent in serenity, close to the nature she loved.

This film is thorough and handsomely made, but a little too much on the dutiful and academic side. It has parallels as a story with Bruno Nuytten's 1988 Camille Claudel, but it has neither the level of drama nor the presence of Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Adjani (as Rodin and Claudel) to give it energy. As director Provost has said, Uhde had a "dark side": his willingness to virtually abandon Seraphine when things got rough for her, and not to bother looking for her when he first returns to France after the War. Provost leaves this mysterious, which is just historically, but unsatisfying cinematically. But Provost did apparently help organize the recent Musee Maillol exhibition of Seraphine's work. And this film is a thought-provoking addition to the on-screen literature of outsider or visionary art.

The film opened in theaters in Paris on October 1, 2008 to respectful if not overly enthusiastic reviews. It has been bought by Music Box in the US, but no release has been announced. Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NYC, in March 2009. Seraphine won seven Cesars at the February 28, 2009 ceremony, Best Film, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Photography, Best Music, Best Decor, and Best Costumes.

Released on US DVD March 23, 2010.


MUSEE MAILLOL EXHIBITION POSTER