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As coincidences go, it must have been one of the most fortunate in 20th century art. The year is 1914 and world war one is lying in wait. Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a quiet, noble-minded German art critic and collector, leaves Paris and rents an apartment in the neighbouring town of Senlis. Uhde, we learn, is a heavy hitter in the art world. He was responsible largely for the discovery of Pablo Picasso and George Braque. He's in the process of turning Henri Rousseau into a star. Then he's invited to dinner by his insufferable landlady and her bourgeois friends. He spots a painting lying in a corner on the floor. He picks it up. He's stunned. He asks who painted it. The landlady is stunned too. She almost doesn't want to tell him. But eventually she does. It was painted, she says, by his own house cleaner Séraphine (Yolande Moreau), the oddball, middle-aged woman who skulks about the place singing spiritual hymns to herself.
This biopic by Martin Provost is the true story of Séraphine Louis, a charwoman who became an icon of French painting. (The film almost achieved a clean sweep at the French Oscars, the Cesars.) Séraphine could have been the Susan Boyle of her day: a woman with a ferocious talent locked inside physical awkwardness, and a delicate mind that shied away from a society that held her up to ridicule. But Séraphine did not get to enjoy success. Her career was twice derailed by the Great War and the Great Depression. And then she was consumed by madness.
Provost approaches the film with an almost Bressonian gaze – distant, yet watchful, determined to let this woman's behaviour speak for itself. The film burrows into the rhythms of her life, quietly and without fuss. Séraphine really is a strange one. The big, bumbling woman nimbly climbs a tree just to sit and watch. She goes for a pee in a field and the camera adopts her gaze towards the rustling of leaves which she looks upon in rapt wonder. She idolises nature as a commune with god. When she isn't idling in the woods, she converses with the Virgin Mary.
Séraphine is the kind of person that slips between the cracks – misaligned from a society which views her as soft. You think of Pat Shortt's Josie in Garage and they're not unalike, but for one thing: Josie doesn't paint two-metre-high masterpieces in his bedroom. Nobody, though, notices Séraphine's talents till Uhde shows up. "Shall I tell you what I think?" says one of her employers after demanding to see a painting. "You're wasting your time." Her critic is upset because her apples look like plums. As a modernist painter in the 20th century, this must rank as a minor crime. How would Picasso have ever got past this woman?
Yolande Moreau, a Belgian actress and comedienne, commands the role of Séraphine. Her eyes flit about as if her character can't quite settle her mind. Mostly, though, her face is amusingly inexpressive. Uhde excitedly tells her she has major talent and that he will bankroll her as a patron. She looks at him as if she has just heard the words 'make me an omelette' and instead starts cleaning the floor. The film delicately draws out a portrait of her as being unsound of mind, and explores the thin line between mental illness and religious ecstasy.
You can imagine what a mess Hollywood would have made of this topic. Think of the mangle Joe Wright recently made of mental illness and genius in The Soloist and that film's patronising aggrandisement. Or of how Hollywood in general prefers to treat biopics – so enamoured is it with the realisation of the American dream, it can rarely fix its eye on anything but the prize of success. Here, Provost demonstrates success not as acceptance in society, but as reaching the fullness of one's abilities. We witness the flowering of Séraphine's genius and the moment is never triumphant. Instead, it's reserved, even spiritual. Séraphine brings out painting after painting by candlelight to different viewers over a period of a few months, and each one is richer and more deeply accomplished than the last.
What's fascinating about the vibrant minimalism of Séraphine's art is that she was an isolated island, self-taught and largely ignorant. Where other artists were painting in reaction to what had come before, the film shows Séraphine in a long period of isolation, connecting with the trend for naïf art powered only by her own sensualist, inner forces.
Much like Flaubert's great short story 'A Simple Heart', Séraphine is the study of a woman pure in spirit. Just like Flaubert's heroine Felicité, she is unable to make a steer of her own life, helpless in the hands of fate. Felicité became besotted with a parrot and religion as she went blind. Séraphine too, as she loses the muse to insanity, might as well have lost her sight. Success would eventually find her, but it would be too late for her to enjoy it.
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