An artist without training, driven by an a fierce religious zeal, Seraphine Louis scrounged blood from the local butcher and candle wax from her church to help create the colors and textures of her paintings, and the semi-documentary, "Seraphine," that tells her life story, is a small masterpiece. It opens here today with a track record that carries a trail of recent Cesars (the French equivalent of the Oscar), including Best Picture and Best Actress for Yolande Moreau, who is staggeringly powerful in the title role.
Seraphine (1864-1942) later changed her surname to de Senlis, after the small rural town in which she lived. Little is known of her early life, but screenwriters Martin Provost, who also directed, and Marc Abdelnour show her as a simple country girl, literate but largely unschooled, devout, lonely and living a hand-to-mouth existence.
Everything changed when she met Wilhelm Uhde (a taut, controlled performance by Ulrich Tukur), a German art collector and dealer, who was away from Paris in the summer of 1912, not eager to display two crucial facts. He was German and he was a homosexual. But he recognized Seraphine’s talent, describing it as "primitive modernism," adding it to his collection of work by Picasso, Braque and Rousseau and obviously profiting considerably from the relationship.
She painted mostly from nature, emphasizing the world around her small town, much as Van Gogh painted scenes around Arles, and her intense, vibrant colors are striking.
Befriended only by Uhde and M. Duval, who sold (and gave) paints and canvases to her, Seraphine was a lonely figure, often mocked by the women of the town. It’s a wonderful performance from Moreau, under costumes and makeup that add years and pounds. The war separated her and Uhde, but he came upon her, still in Senlis, in 1927. Things went very well; there was plenty of money, but when the Depression hit, paintings did not sell, money dried up and Seraphine, who spent like a child in a candy store, did not understand what was going on.
Uhde, tall and elegant, is well-played by Tukur, but everyone in the film is in the shadow of Moreau, who is filled to overflowing with the spirit and the pain of the character she plays.
At the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe