This is a film about the important years of French naive painter Séraphine de Senlis' life and art. She is played beautifully by Yolande Morreau who has already won a few awards for the performance - and very deservedly so!
The film begins with Séraphine as a simple house maid in 1915 who lives in a convent and paints pictures of flowers and foliage with supplies and paint that she makes herself. She has no training and is hardly a strong intellectual force, but her pictures are delightful. She is a woman with tremendous faith who claims that her artistic ability is a gift from God. When a German art dealer rents a house she cleans, he discovers her paintings and gets very excited. He is an expert and dealer of naive art and immediately buys all of Séraphine's works. Over the next 30 years, the money she makes from selling her art, as well as the psychological pressure the attention puts on her, drives her crazy, until she is ultimately is put into an asylum.
The story is very simple and typically French and slow. I wish we could have seen more of her work - or even more of her making her work. Rather director Martin Provost spends most of the time showing Séraphine simply dealing with daily life. (Then again, I guess that's what it means to be a naive artist - you have a life and a job and you paint at night or whenever.) I felt like I could never connect to the art well enough (though when I saw it, I did really like it). I wish Provost had done a bit more of an Andrei-Rublev-style concentration and display of the art. (That's not totally fair to compare it to the best movie ever made, but whatever.)
This is a fascinating story, as what made this woman known and relevant now is also what essentially killed her in the end. Had her art never been discovered, she might have happily lived out her days as a simple maid with a deep faith. Instead, her art - which she never did to find fame or attention, but because she was moved inside to make it - exposed her to a life that she could never have been mentally ready for and ultimately ruined her.
This is a nice film, but not totally worth the 130 minutes it takes. I didn't love the structure and think it could have been tightened a good amount. Some of Séraphine's stranger actions were tied to her psychology, but never totally explained in dialogue or on screen.
Again, Yolande Morreau's performance is magnificent and deserves to be remembered in American award season next winter.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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