Seraphine
Do you know French actor Yolande Moreau? Perhaps you saw her as the gossipy Comtesse d’Artelles in Martin Provost’s film Une Vieille Maitresse (An Old Mistress). Or in any one of the many character roles she has played over the past couple of decades.
If you haven’t seen her, or if you don’t remember her, you can see her performance in Martin Provost’s latest feature Seraphine. Even those who have seen Ms Moreau in previous films are apt to familiarise themselves anew with her talents. And you will share the discovery of Moreau’s talent alongside those who have seen her before, as this is quite unlike anything Moreau has done before.
Telling the poetic but tragic story of naive artist Seraphine Louis, more commonly known as Seraphine de Senlis (after the region in which she lived), Provost’s biopic is an enthralling and heartwrenching journey through the latter part of her life.
Seraphine de Senlis, the daughter of illiterate peasants, spent much of her life as a shepherdess, before gaining employment as a domestic servant. It was in this second phase of her life that she encountered Willhelm Uhde, a contemporary art dealer and German expatriate living in France.
Uhde took an interest in Seraphine’s striking tableaux: vivid, child-like paintings of plant life in the area, surprisingly colourful for such a verdant region. While locals had dismissed Seraphine’s work in favour of the more traditional artistic styles, Uhde saw tremendous value in it.
Added to her eccentric artistic style, was Seraphine’s religious obsessions, which increased as she got older, and eventually consumed her.
The unique visual style of her art, bursting with simplistic colour, and her spiritual fervour bring artist Vincent van Gough to mind: a sufferer of temporal lobe epilepsy. He, too, was engulfed by religious fervour. One can’t help but wonder if Seraphine had some similar form of injury, though without the seizures.
Yolande Moreau is utterly captivating as Seraphine. Provost, once again, effortlessly captures a sense of the time in which this story is set, while at the same time bringing it vividly to life: the constant sound of wind in the trees (a threnody to our protagonist) and the creaking of rustic furniture indoors make you feel as if you’re quietly moving through the story, as it unfolds before you. Provost’s recreations of the past are not stylised frozen moments in time, but akin to a form of time travel in which the viewer is deposited into the lives of others.
The final shot in the film is as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking.