Seraphine

Yolande Moreau as Séraphine de Senlis

Martin Provost's Séraphine is an interesting biopic of the French painter Séraphine Louis better known as Séraphine de Senlis. The film pictures her life through her interactions with her primary patron, Wilhem Uhde, a noted German critic, collector, and art dealer who also championed the works of Braque, Picasso, and Henri Rousseau. Séraphine painted vivid, colorful images of flora and fauna, at one point in the film Uhde compares her work to that of van Gogh and that seems to be apt. Because of her lack of training and mental health issues, Séraphine is often pigeonholed as an outsider artist (aren't they all), a modern primitive, an example of Art Brut or a naive artist; the latter a term Uhde disliked.  

Séraphine was orphaned at seven and trained by the local Sisters of Providence for a life of servitude. This was how Uhde found her in the town of Senlis, just north of Paris in 1914. She was eking out a meagre living as a cleaner and washerwoman. Provost stresses the hardships of her life, but also her resourcefulness. We see her Séraphine wandering the countryside on her off hours, utilizing the local flowers and plants for her pigments. Séraphine is devout in her religious beliefs. Her paintings reflect the ecstasy she feels gazing upon God's creations. Uhde is the first to recognize the vitality and passion of her work. He is eager to bring her work to wider recognition, but the First World War intervenes.

                                            

The real Séraphine

The film jumps to 1927 by which time Uhde has resettled in France with his sister and the painter Helmut Kolle, Uhde's protege and lover. Fate reunites him with Séraphine who has continued to paint, but who is having increasing trouble making ends meet as she ages. Uhde's patronage buttresses Séraphine for awhile, but her behavior becomes more and more unhinged. Uhde is desolated by his lover's death from endocarditis and cannot protect Séraphine from her wilder impulses. She takes to the streets of Senlis in a wedding dress (shades of Miss Havisham) and proceeds to leave her silver on the doorsteps of her neighbors. This lands her in an asylum which Uhde visits, but she is lost to him forever.  

Séraphine falls just short of being a masterpiece because it lacks the audacity of its subject. However, Yolande Moreau's performance as Séraphine and Ulrich Tukur's as Uhde are two for the ages, a contrast between two very different creatures united by a love of art. Séraphine was warmly received by American critics and won the César award for best picture, but has been unjustly forgotten in the intervening years. It is a small treasure that I highly recommend.

King Lear

Jean-Luc Godard in King Lear

I enjoyed Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, but would hesitate to recommend the film to the neophyte Godard viewer. This 1987 film is truly an odd concoction, one of Cannon Films brief forays into art films during that era. The film uneasily alternates pretentious twaddle with sublime genius. Godard does not present us with an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, but a fragmented meditation upon it. The film has no straightforward narrative, but is an visual-audio collage that assays both the lowbrow and the high. The film is pitched as a dialectical exercise: Cordelia versus Lear, virtue versus power, youth versus age, feminine versus masculine, and, the ultimate struggle for a purveyor of images, light versus dark.

King Lear started out as a commercial seeming project, but the end product was so obtuse that it did not open in France until 2002. Norman Mailer, at one point, was collaborating on the script, but (quelle surprise) locked horns with Godard and vamoosed. He appears briefly in the film's prologue. Woody Allen was supposed to play the fool and shows up in the film's coda. There are remnants of a gangster script that Godard unsuccessfully peddled to Hollywood. Lear, played with gusto by Burgess Meredith, is dubbed Don Learo and recites from Albert Fried's The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. He and Molly Ringwald's Cordelia rehearse their lines at a lakeside resort in Switzerland. Godard's camera is usually fixed like the images we glimpse from Sargent, Fra Angelico, Goya, Doré, Fuseli, and scores more.

I can't tell you that it adds up because obfuscation is Godard's goal. As he put it, "the most important will be the most hidden." Not only is the array of images only semi-decipherable, so is the soundtrack. Recitations are garbled or tweaked electronically. Dialogue overlaps with vocal narration to the point of unintelligibility. Godard appears as "Professor Pluggy", an augury of the switched on era of the internet and an inscrutable mentor to the young. The Godard who loves Jerry Lewis is in full evidence here, but Godard's clown, Peter Sellars, doesn't have the comic chops necessary for his pratfalls. If the scene of Sellars slurping soup is the film's nadir, a scene of Julie Delpy ironing is worthy of either Renoir. Leos Carax, who appears here as "Edgar", is one of the few living French filmmakers able to conjure the playful mischief of Jean-Luc Godard. It is this spirit that I value in King Lear and one wholly appropriate for a film that is both a burlesque and an unfathomable critique of pure reason. The recently released Criterion Collection disc is immaculate.

Last Summer, Queen of Hearts

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker

I was about halfway through Catherine Breillat's Last Summer (L'Été dernier) when it finally dawned on me that it was a remake of a Danish film I saw a few years ago, May el-Touky's Queen of Hearts. In both films, the attorney wife of a successful, if somewhat boring business man has a fling with her teenaged step-son. Both films are well acted and appointed, but I thought Ms. el-Touky and her collaborators did a better job of coming to grips with the implications of the material than the makers of the French film.

Ms. Breillat quickly and forcefully establishes her female protagonist, Anne, played by Léa Drucker, as capable and compassionate in her profession. She has a warm relationship with her older husband and their two adorable adopted daughters. The only fly in the ointment is surly step-son, Theo, who is living with them after getting tossed out of his Geneva boarding school. However, after we see the perfunctory sex between Anne and her husband, the audience knows it is only a matter of time before Theo and Anne cross the Rubicon of transgressive love. 

As Theo, Samuel Kircher is appealing in his youthful cluelessness. Ms. Drucker is adept at showing both the steel and vulnerability of Anne. Ms. Breillat is successful at both evoking and sending up the French bourgeoise (or as Anne calls them normopaths) here, a scene with Anne and her charges riding through the French countryside in a Mercedes convertible while blasting Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots" is both sublime and ridiculous, but she skirts the issue of what results when society's spoken and unspoken laws are trangressed. Abuse is papered over in Last Summer and treated with silence. Perhaps this accurately reflects Ms. Breillat's feelings towards how French society deals with such issues, but, compared to how Queen of Hearts deals head on with damage done by social ruptures, it is a cop-out.