Séraphine

Long and slow, but majestic and moving, Martin Provost’s film about an outsider artist in France between the wars swept seven Césars last year, including Best Picture and Best Actress.  Séraphine (Louis, later known as De Senlis) is a pious middle-aged cleaning lady and laundress, nowhere near as simple as she seems, with a passion for painting in secret, mostly still lifes of flowers imbued with hallucinatory intensity.  One of her paintings comes to the attention of a tenant whom she’s serving, and he turns out to be Wilhelm Uhde, a gallerist and art critic who gives her crucial encouragement, but his promises of exhibition in Paris come to nothing when he flees before the invading Germans at the start of World War I.  Despite the disappointment, Séraphine redoubles her efforts, so when their paths cross again more than ten years later, she has a body of work to show, which he begins to sell.  The late-blooming success then goes to her head in more ways than one.  Already I’ve betrayed the way the film unfolds, unless you are familiar with the painter’s biography in advance, since you never know for sure where it’s going.  You see Séraphine going about her chores -- with some mysterious interludes of collecting pigments -- for half an hour before you get the idea that she is anything more than a peasant.  Yolande Moreau is exceptional in portraying a simple, circumscribed life lit from within, and also the pride with which the artist later displays her work, in scenes that artfully survey her paintings in their finished state, as well as her distress when things go bad.  Director Provost’s approach is unhurried and visually acute, attuned to concentrated looking, so it’s definitely not a film for everyone, but rather for those with eyes to see and patience to understand.  (2009, dvd.)  *7*  (MC-84.)