The euphoria, lunacy and transformative intensity of art receive passionate, perhaps immortal treatment in Seraphine, Martin Provost's quietly magical and urgently moving film.
It dominated the last Cesar awards (the French Oscars), including wins for best picture, script and actress (Yolande Moreau). How Provost lost the directing prize is beyond me, since the film is a triumph of empathy and vision.
It makes a measured yet enthralling drama from the life-struggle of Seraphine Louis, an inarticulate and eccentric cleaning woman from the provincial town of Senlis, to master vast inner turmoil and an inspiration-driven, go-for-broke style of painting akin to Vincent van Gogh's.
The movie spans her life from the eve of World War I, when German art critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) first discovered Seraphine, to her final years in a mental hospital, where he spent her earnings on a decent room with access to her one abiding pleasure: the outdoors.
These two characters provide the movie with an enigmatic, touching core. The aesthete boasts a keen nose for authentic accomplishment - he praised and collected Picasso and "outsider art" before Picasso became a brand name and outsider art an accepted term. He recognizes that Seraphine has developed an artistic temperament from necessity - and she senses that he believes in her. Even though she mistrusts "smart" people and often misunderstands him, she can read his moods like an emotional psychic.
It's fitting that Seraphine enters the Charles the day after the last showing of Hiroshi Teshigahara's Gaudi. Seraphine, the devout French peasant, like Antonio Gaudi, the devout Catalan architect, dedicated herself to translating what she saw as the beauty and joy of God's universe into an idiosyncratic art so vibrant that colors and curves come alive.
Gaudi used casts of live animals and models for the sacred statues adorning his mammoth cathedral at Barcelona; Serpahine mixes her own paints with ingredients such as chicken blood and votive candles.
Happily, Provost is an honest-to-god moviemaker rather than a hagiographer or frustrated art critic. He sets up the film as a mystery that promises to answer not the classic question of "whodunit?" but what is she doing and why is she doing it? Provost respects the unknowable essence of creation. And the distance he keeps from his heroine magnifies our connection to her art by making us hyper-alert to any clues she drops about her creative imagination. Because of Provost's keen observations and Moreau's performance, as warm and worn and eloquently lumpy as an aging couch, we experience this woman's immersion in her material and her craft.
