SÉRAPHINE – Reviewed by Boswell McNamara

Francis Bacon not so much with a brush but with scalpel strokes lay back the skin of a dark existence. Gauguin sought, found and painted his garden of Eden. Basquiat, careerist that he was, perhaps didn’t completely translate but at least jotted down semaphore signals from the streets. In films trying to interpret the lives of these and other artists, it’s usually a mixed bag of tortured soul biopic clichés.

The film Séraphine, like the real life artist, is not instantly engaging. It opens just before the First World War in the French town of Senlis. Séraphine Louis, a cleaning woman, earns barely enough to survive. A hulking, eccentric but oddly competent presence, actress Yolande Moreau portrays Séraphine not as an untrained talent who will blossom under proper tutelage but as a person on a mission with instructions from her guardian angel. Her face is still, almost leaden at times but can break into a slight smile. Her eyes are bright and fierce, sometimes twinkling but also mask-like. She is a childlike cypher albeit with an occasional sharp tongue. She gathers materials when and where she can. Blood from the butcher shop, oil from devotional candles. She grinds and mixes her own colors with inexpensive white paint, sings hymns as she uses her fingers to spread pigment and creates Cezanne-like still lifes of fruit and flowers. As her skill grows, so do the sizes of her canvases and so too her subject matter. Tangles of foliage that are lush and dense, undulating and otherworldly but at the same time precise. Powerful and hypnotic, but devotional works in her eyes only.

She becomes the cleaning lady for Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German art collector staying in Senlis and a champion of Picasso and Rousseau who sees in Séraphine the same out-of-step, self-taught genius that probably won’t be appreciated until years later. Separated by WWI, then reunited years later, throughout the film Séraphine and Uhde carry on a pithy, intuitive relationship. “Do I look like the type to mock?” he asks. Her reply, “…a bit.” Uhde, a gay man living in another country whose artist lover dies, perhaps understands Séraphine’s deliberate separateness like no one else can. Séraphine’s past is never fully gone into, and the film is the better for it, but the vision from on high that fuels Séraphine’s art pulls her in two directions: towards the desire for more of the small financial success she’s found and to the fevered completion of this artistic mission given by the angels.

Not bravura cinema like Pollock or Lust for Life and leaving a good portion of clichés in that mixed bag, Séraphine has its own delicate holy fire. – [DVD]

Biography/Drama/War

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 3/23/10