Seraphine is a well-crafted French film that effectively captures one woman's experience with art, religion, and mental illness, and features a brilliant performance from Yolande Moreau.
Seraphine is a well-crafted French film that effectively captures one woman's experience with art, religion, and mental illness, and features a brilliant performance from Yolande Moreau.
Belgian actress Yolande Moreau headlines this biopic, starring as a little-known but uncommonly brilliant painter. Frenchwoman Séraphine Louis (Moreau), aka Séraphine de Senlis, lived from 1864 to 1942. Though ostensibly a shepherdess and housekeeper whose chief duties involved cooking, cleaning, and ironing, in her off-hours Séraphine joyously turned to natural elements of the outdoor world, with which she felt a tremendous degree of emotional and spiritual communion. Séraphine channeled these
undying passions through painting, and, having only the scantest materials at hand, created paints from elements such as animal blood, oil from church candles, and dirt pulled from the ground. With these crude and raw tools, the nascent, budding artist created tableaux of floral arrangements utterly unlike any seen before. Sadly, those around Séraphine perceived the paintings as coarse and unimpressive -- something of a joke. Her life took a most fantastic turn, then, when Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German art critic, turned up in Senlis -- and laid eyes on the young woman's creations for the first time. Yet, despite the success that Uhde brought to Séraphine, a sad future still lay ahead for the young woman -- one accompanied by continued obscurity and emotional isolation. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
What makes this slow, intense film so compelling is its persuasive creation of complex characters: You scarcely believe Moreau is an actor and that the film isn't, on some level, archival footage of the real painter.
Provost and cowriter Marc Abdelnour explore the mutable boundaries between spirituality, naivete, genius, and madness, showing how the two outsiders and polar opposites cultivated a mutual understanding.
Yolande Moreau plays the industrious but touched washerwoman-turned-painter Séraphine de Senlis with an open-faced conviction that is almost unnerving in its intensity.
Séraphine may be one of the spookiest, most unsettling films ever made about the hazy line between art and madness. That's a theme the movies have done to death, yet it finds new life in the title performance by Yolande Moreau.
The characterization is deft, the acting is superb, and the production values are high. If there's a dryness to the way the story is told, that's because director Martin Provost has shifted his focus toward intellectual, not emotional, satisfaction.
Engrossing, well-shot bio-pic ... which won seven Cesars, including Best Picture, from the French Academy in 2008, has a gorgeous antique look and a surfeit of empathy. A lovely, lingering film.
It's a plodding film in its storytelling, but with a sensitive attitude to its subject. In its best moments, it simply wonders at the rapturous state in which this devout Christian creates her art.
It's like reading the introductory essay in an exhibition catalogue, except that it takes two hours. Personally, I couldn't stop thinking of Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent.
This biopic, which swept the board at the Césaires, is somewhat over-inclined to reverence and simplification; but it is also, some of the time, rewarding and touching.
Séraphine doesn't mess with the formula but the script allows plenty of awkward details to remain and we're allowed to decide for ourselves if fame was a godsend for her.
Depends on your levels of Christmas spirit. Nativity either glorifies the charming amateurishness of the British school play or celebrates the slapdash incompetence of the British film industry.
This film is decent, to say the most. To call it a masterpiece is too much... This biographical story revolves around a poor cleaner who turns out to have amazing artistic talent. It is the typical French tragedy, done with typical French cinematography. I never liked the character Seraphine much, although from time to
time I sympathized with her. Her acting was unique. It was as if she was taken straight from a poor country into the studio, because there is NOTHING about her that resembles an actress, or a star. But, all in all, the movie was well done.
Period drama uses the "tortured genius" blueprint to tell the story of Séraphine Louis, a mentally disturbed housekeeper, with a secret passion to paint. A self-taught outsider to the art world, her works were highlighted by intricately ornate floral arrangements. Sadly, she is such a profoundly quiet, withdrawn
woman, her personality fails to engage as a character. It's difficult to care for this dreary woman. Biography also fails to shed light on what made this woman tick. She loves to paint, but no insight concerning why. She is plagued by mental illness, but no explanation as to what she suffers from or if it can be cured. It's clear the encouragement of German art collector Wilhelm Uhde lifted her spirits immeasurably and helped her to become psychologically stable for a time. This makes the subsequent actions of those around her, a thoroughly exasperating experience. Nice cinematography, but the glacial pacing is sleep inducing.
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