by Julian Wood
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Vincent Macaigne, Cécile de France, Stacy Martin, Anouk Grinberg, André Marcon, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
Intro:
… a classic French art movie (no pun intended), in which the beautiful scenery, costumes and food provide much of the obvious visual appeal.
The names of the French painters from the Impressionist period are well known, but often less so are the names of their wives and muses. Such is probably the case with Pierre Bonnard and his life-long partner Marthe. Director Martin Provost has visited this terrain before, bringing a gender-aware lens to a painters’ fame in his 2008 film Seraphine. This film, however, is more a portrait of a marriage.
When we first meet Pierre (Vincent Macaigne), he is already convinced that he is going to become an artist, but all he has on his side is ambition. When he meets the shy ingénue Marthe (Cécile de France), he woos her ferociously. She shyly agrees to be his model and – somewhat predicably – she soon becomes his mistress. In a way, her character arc is more interesting than his, as she has to go from dependent young woman with no position in French society to a blazing and fearless bohemian. The film shows her taking up painting herself, but it is made pretty clear that she will always be less feted than her husband by the art world.
The focus on Bonnard is an interesting choice in some ways. He is not an indisputably great painter in the way that, say, Cezanne and Monet (Bonnard’s friend played here by André Marcon), but his place in the canon is secure nonetheless. His paintings always suggest a kind of eroticised domesticity, combined with an opportunistic obsession with his wife in states of undress. Madame Bonnard’s body is certainly familiar to art lovers, as she is in a huge proportion of his canvasses. Old Pierre is prone to the odd skinny dip himself, but his body is not the subject of the gaze in the same way as hers in the film (as well as the art, of course). As prominent art theorist Kenneth Clarke said years ago, in art there is a fundamental difference between mere nakedness and the artistic trope of the nude.
In terms of actually depicting a painter’s talents, the film slightly fails to rise to the challenge. There are lots of shots of Bonnard at his canvas, but they mostly consist of him dabbing away with his trademark yellow to already largely finished works. We don’t really get the sense of studio life with all its messiness and daily honing of the craft. Here, Bonnard paints in his ordinary clothes with not a drop sheet in sight, which feels inauthentic somehow. Nor do we get a piercing examination of the deep relationship between the artist and model as we do, say, in Jacques Rivette’s famous film La Belle Noiseuse.
In looks and tone, Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe is pretty much a classic French art movie (no pun intended), in which the beautiful scenery, costumes and food provide much of the obvious visual appeal. Both the cast and the scenery are easy on the eye. It isn’t memorably deep in terms of psychology or drama though, and there are one or two scenes where jealous outbursts lead to an attack of tragic over-acting. Also, one of the main challenges is that the pair lived a long time, so we have the obligatory and slightly too familiar attempts to show them in grey-haired old age. The main part of the two hour running time however, concerns their mostly idyllic life in a beautiful country house on the Seine, a few miles out of Paris. Cue lots of eating al fresco and skinny dipping (the Serine was presumably swimmable in those days).
If you like outdoor picnics and a bit of picture-postcard Frenchness, then this should fit the bill. More wine and cheese anyone?