Martin Provost (2008)
I didn’t realise until seeing the film that Séraphine Louis was a real person – the French painter (1864-1942) known as ‘Séraphine de Senlis’. Séraphine won seven Césars earlier this year, including Best Film. I went to the Filmhouse with the sense that this was the kind of picture the French film establishment is fond of. It’s about someone who made art in an art for which is France is renowned and which is more respectable than movies. At the same time, its period and physical settings allow the director Martin Provost opportunities to evoke hallowed sites, small town and rural, of the golden age of French realist cinema. So I wasn’t prejudiced in its favour. The picture is in many respects unimaginative. It moves deliberately and it’s too long. But I’m pleased I saw it and I don’t think it’s only because I then went straight on to see A Serious Man that I feel so well disposed in retrospect to Séraphine.
Séraphine spent most of her life in domestic work for middle-class families in Senlis, a small town some forty kilometres from Paris. We see her scrubbing floors, doing the laundry; one of her cleaning jobs was at a convent and it’s obvious from the start of the film that she’s simply and devoutly religious. She loves nature – sitting out in the fields or high in a tree, examining wild flowers with a sense of wonder, at one point bathing in the river where we usually see her washing sheets. But she also paints, alone in a tiny rented room (the next best thing to a garret). She spends a good part of her meagre income on artist materials and is usually behind with the rent as a result. Out on her walks she gathers berries and other flora which she works into her paint and paintings. The film, which begins in 1913 and ends in the mid-1930s, tells the story of how Séraphine was discovered as a ‘naïve’ artist by the German art critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde – he takes a suite of rooms in one of the houses where she works – and of both their lives from that point on.
Séraphine is the kind of movie that gets described as ‘gentle’, partly because its protagonist doesn’t say much and seems to be, in all respects, un coeur simple, partly because it isn’t action-packed. I think this is both a euphemism for slow and understates the variety of emotional distress that Provost (who also co-wrote the screenplay, with Marc Abdelnour) gets across. For at least the first third of its 125 minutes, the film moves at a snail’s pace. The observation is minute and meticulous but the texture is pretty thin: there’s not much suggestion of things going on below the surface. What’s undistinguished about Séraphine throughout is how many of the details seem generic: the local houseowners who treat this middle-aged Cinderella like shit; the dinner party to which they invite Uhde once they’ve discovered who he is and where they prattle derisively about modern art; the scenes in the mental asylum to which Séraphine is eventually committed in the early 1930s. It’s during the dinner party that Uhde first sees one of her pieces and asks who it’s by. This sequence is clumsily staged but it’s redeemed when Uhde takes the painting back to his own apartment and looks at it again by candlelight.
What’s strong about Séraphine is the relationship between its two main characters. From the start they like each other (and perhaps she’s physically attracted to him). And Séraphine, with her limited vocabulary, is able to outwit this very clever and sophisticated man – as when he first compliments her on her paintings:
Séraphine: Sir, you’re making fun of me.
Uhde: Not at all. Do I look like someone who would do that?
Séraphine: A bit.
Wilhelm Uhde (1874-1947) appears to have been a character not much less remarkable than Séraphine. He was one of the earliest collectors of cubist art and exhibited Braque and Picasso in his gallery in Montparnasse. When he first came to Senlis, Uhde had already promoted the work of other ‘naïve’ artists (his preferred term is ‘new primitives’), notably Le Douanier Rousseau. After he fled France on the outbreak of World War I, Uhde’s collection was auctioned off by the French government. On the film’s account he came back to France at the end of the war to resume collecting, as well as to find Séraphine again. Having failed to do the latter on his first return to Senlis (although it’s not clear why he doesn’t ask around a bit more), Uhde goes back there to an exhibition of local art, where he sees her unmistakable work. At some point in the 1920s (again it’s not clear exactly when), he gives her the financial means to give up the physically arduous drudgery which she’s getting too old to cope with and to devote herself to her art. This new-found freedom begins to go to Séraphine’s head, in more ways than one: she spends extravagantly and begins to have religious delusions, the voices of angels telling her what to do. When the market crashes at the start of the Depression, Uhde has to draw his horns in so that he can’t fund either a promised exhibition in Paris or Séraphine’s prodigious spending. Soon afterwards, she is wandering the streets in a bridal gown (one of her recent purchases) and, with her neighbours fearful for her sanity, is committed to an asylum. Martin Provost is wise not to force the question of whether Séraphine would have been better off – or remained saner at least – if her life hadn’t changed. The answer clearly isn’t a simple yes or no.
Her paintings seem decorative in conception but the patterned images in them – fruit and flowers, more or less abstract, seem to predominate – have a wildness and a richly-coloured intensity. Yolande Moreau’s interpretation of Séraphine has a corresponding mixture of elements: she does all that the conventional progressions of the story require with great skill but she’s especially good in suggesting a propensity for emotional extremity shading into psychic instability – for example in her passionate, sometimes off-key singing of hymns, which seem to foreshadow the visionary mania that eventually takes over. When Séraphine is working at her pictures, Moreau has a rapt vigour which is very persuasive. She’s physically quite imposing and moves with a clumsy propulsion that’s especially startling as Séraphine blunders round Senlis in her wedding dress. (I assumed she saw herself as partly the bride of Christ and partly, and no less improbably, as the bride of Uhde.) Moreau makes Séraphine believable in various ways: she does suggest a spiritual quality; at the same time, the director (with the help of his costume designer, Madeline Fontaine) avoids the temptation of beautifying Séraphine as a child of nature. She usually looks far from clean; Provost creates a striking physical contrast between her and the fair-skinned, super-hygienic Wilhelm Uhde, played by Ulrich Tukur.
As the baron in The White Ribbon, Tukur doesn’t stand out – it’s one of the less distinctive roles – but he’s subtly impressive as Uhde. In the early scenes there’s a slight but definite discontinuity between, on the one hand, Uhde’s rather dandified dress and extrovert gait and, on the other, the self-effacing, closed-off quality he has in conversation with others. It transpires that Uhde is homosexual – and that his decision to live away from Paris in the relative seclusion of Senlis is a form of hiding. (The irony is that in Senlis, on the eve of war with Germany, he’s stigmatised instead as one of the ‘Boche’.) Martin Provost introduces this cleverly. We first see Uhde with a pretty young woman whom we assume to be his wife or some kind of sexual partner. It’s when Séraphine mentions her, jealously, that Uhde explains that Anne-Marie is his younger sister. Tukur gives Uhde a surface prissiness and a deeper guardedness. When the woman who owns the house where he’s rented rooms invites him to dinner, she tells him, ‘Your secret is out’, and we see him freeze (but in a way that’s not apparent to the landlady). She means that she’s discovered he’s a famous man in the art world. This proclivity for guilt serves Tukur very well in the later stages of the story, when Séraphine is losing her mind and he wonders how much he’s to blame.
Séraphine is essentially a two-hander: neither the writing nor the playing of the other parts is memorable, although Anne Bennent is perfectly competent as Anne-Marie. As Helmut Kolle, another of Uhde’s protégés and also his lover, Nico Rogner doesn’t register strongly (and isn’t it a mistake when he pronounces Uhde’s forename as Wilhelm with a W?). The scenes featuring Helmut rather unbalance the narrative: they don’t involve Séraphine and it’s more interesting to see Uhde through her eyes than in a separate life. Details like the scarcity of electric light and the local women washing laundry in the river place the piece in its period setting in a simply effective way. The use of historical events to give us our bearings – the start of World War I, the Wall Street crash – is cruder. I had the sense that the film was being framed and lit (by Laurent Brunet) to suggest images from French art history. I’m too ignorant of that subject to identify specific references, if there were any, but the visual style is very pleasing. What we hear is often expressive too, in moments such as Uhde’s looking intently at Séraphine’s work with the sounds of her cleaning the scullery floor in the background.
28 November 2009
