by Finnlay Dall
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Charlotte Le Bon, John Robinson, Damien Bonnard, Judith Chemla, Alan Fromager
Intro:
Le Bon’s distraught, damaged and sometimes distant performance does a lot of heavy lifting for the film’s emotional core.
Before Niki de Saint Phalle (Charlotte Le Bon) became a revolutionary artist and painter, she was a well established actor in France. Having fled the United States in the 1950s with her husband, writer Harry Matthews (John Robinson), for fear of political persecution, she enjoys their contented life with a newborn daughter. However, when a trip to an art gallery triggers her repressed childhood memories, thoughts of self-harm reemerge. For her own safety, she is soon admitted to a psychiatric ward to recover.
Le Bon’s distraught, damaged and sometimes distant performance does a lot of heavy lifting for the film’s emotional core. Her mental distress bubbles to the surface as physical symptoms: red and puffy eyes, cold sweats and forced swallowing: the sickness with which the trauma of her father’s abuse still haunts her body is palpable.
Director Céline Sallette supports her lead with allusions to other women out of place and out of time. Her trip to the gallery as an adult is taken straight from Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), in which Ingrid Bergman’s Katherine is simultaneously drawn to and terrified by the gods and goddesses around her.
Niki’s time in hospital is torturous. Her doctor’s refusal to let her paint during treatment, which includes the rather barbaric practice of electroshock therapy, has left her with nothing to do but to go insane. However, through her hardship, she discovers a defiant attitude within herself, emboldening her to create art out of whatever she can find in the garden. Chewing up food for a rudimentary glue and sticking together bits of dirt and leaves, Niki is able to show her psychiatrist that her art is helping her rather than hurting her.
And as we skip forward in time, Niki soon finds work as a bonafide artist; finding comfort in a group of emerging sculptors and painters, including the man who was to be her future collaborator and lover, Jean Tinguely (Damien Bonnard).
Sallette ultimately shows this group to be a bittersweet salvation, as many of the members – apart from Jean and Eva Aeppli (Judith Chemla) – are either abusive and malicious towards Niki, or ignore her talents completely. When all the artists are introduced to the painter known as Arman, Niki’s name is skipped, as none of the sea of men that she’s surrounded by even glance in her direction.
The film insists that it was the men in the artist’s life that kept her from succeeding. Whether it was her abusive father, her well meaning husband whose writing took precedence, the selfish son who wanted his toy plane back, or the museum curator who detested her collage work, these men were always the ones to box her in.
Yet confusingly, the film also makes Niki’s success dependent on the kindness of Jean and Harry, often leaving Eva’s support as a minor footnote in her grander narrative.
Sallete makes bold choices to strengthen her debut. Time is linear, but years will skip by from one scene to the next, often without fanfare. When we see the once newborn daughter of Niki stride into the ward garden as a long-haired toddler for example, the audience is awash with grief. It is emotionally effective, but often makes the order of events chaotic. Niki will berate her psychiatrist in the last ten minutes of the film for an action that took place in the first twenty. It is deserved no doubt, but reads as an afterthought for an unresolved plotline, rather than an intentional choice by the director.
Additionally, none of Niki’s work is shown on screen, its creation often implied through Le Bon’s breaking of plates or when she throws knives at canvas. This undoubtedly meant that the film could pay tribute to the artist and not just her work – something which A Complete Unknown failed to accomplish in its two and a half hour music video.
But because her work often brought to life her trauma and her frustrations with the industry at large, the film’s omission defangs a great deal of Niki’s actions as a character – relegating her defiance to more of a desire than something more tangible that the audience can see. As a result, Harry and Jean (both men) have to tell the audience how powerful her work actually was.
Niki is a biopic about a unique artist and filmmaker in her own right. Yet, its uneven pacing and ironic reliance on male characters to push the plot forward, makes the whole project feel impersonal.
