The cleaner who painted wild visions in blood
Moreau conveys brilliantly the artistic intensity of French primitive painter Séraphine, says Andrew M Brown

27 November 2009

Séraphine, played by Yolande Moreau, is a fragile character who reacts badly to the idea of celebrity status

Yolande Moreau, as French primitive painter Séraphine de Senlis, (1864-1942) bears a marked visual resemblance to Beatrix Potter's hedgehog character Mrs Tiggy-winkle. Séraphine is a cleaning lady, middle-aged and stout, covered in shawl and hat, and has a prominent, sharp nose and eyes slightly too far apart, features which give her a furtive look. And she does have a secret: that at night by the light of a candle she paints. She mixes her own paints in a mortar using wax stealthily drained from the votive candles in church and blood stolen from the butcher's.

The setting of Martin Provost's fine film is Senlis, a town set in lovely countryside 25 miles north-east of Paris, in 1914. In the opening scenes, with minimal dialogue, Provost shows Séraphine at large - praying intensely at church, greedily tearing at a crust of bread in her mistress's kitchen and later hitching up her voluminous skirts and clambering up a tree from where she gazes out at the meadow, carelessly exposing her plump, lily-white calves to view.

A lodger appears at Madame Duphot's country house, where Séraphine does the laundry and cleans the floors. It is Wilhelm Uhde, a German-born art collector and critic. Ulrich Tukur, the Baron in Haneke's The White Ribbon which came out last week, reappears here as Uhde and with a similarly lofty manner. His urbanity - he wears a silk dressing gown to work in - contrasts with Séraphine's bucolic eccentricity.

Séraphine is not intelligent or educated and might actually be soft in the head. Yet there's an air about her, as if she may possess insights that are denied to clever people and the brittle "society" types she serves.

For one thing, she has a sensual affinity with the natural world. Uhde notices it when, out on a stroll, he spots her splashing in a pool, naked and singing. Also she is extremely devout; she sings hymns and prayers and helps the nuns. Her guardian angel told her to paint, she says. The kindly Mother Superior hints at Séraphine's psychic fragility when she asks if everything is better "in there" - meaning in her head. Séraphine is sensitive to a sadness she detects in Uhde too, and offers him advice and a reviving drink of her potent home-made "energy wine".

There's no trace of self-consciousness in her, at least, that is, until the moment she finds out her paintings are worth something. She seems to lose her innocence, and her personality begins to unravel from the point when Uhde sees her Apples and, shaken, asks: "Do you have any more? I want to see them at once." The paintings affect Uhde in a profound way. "You have a gift," he tells her. She needs to be persuaded at first that he's not mocking her, which is not surprising, since Madame Duphot, her snooty boss, had dismissed the apples as looking more like plums.

Séraphine's life follows such a wretched course in its later stages, one wonders if it might have been better for her - if not for the world of art - if Uhde had never discovered her and if she had simply carried on working hard and, as she says (quoting St Teresa of Avila), "finding God among the cooking pots". Her life passes uneventfully during an interval of more than 10 years after the First World War breaks out and Uhde flees with his sister Anne-Marie (Anne Bennent).

Eventually, however, in the late Twenties Uhde returns to the area, renting a house at Chantilly with Anne-Marie and a male companion. On a whim, thinking Séraphine is probably dead, he decides to visit Senlis, where the town has put on an exhibition of work by local artists.

Sure enough, there he recognises with awe some works of her maturity. At this stage in the film the viewer sees something of what Uhde sees - canvases a metre high or more crowded with flowers and foliage that appear uncomfortably mobile, like insects. They are visions of a turbulent spirit.

Uhde, by now an assiduous promoter of "Le Douanier" (the customs officer) Rousseau and his similarly ingenuous style, insists that Séraphine is as ahead of her time as Van Gogh was of his. She, in her early 60s now, is intoxicated by visions of celebrity, even though the Depression is looming. A delirium takes over: she spends wildly, puts down a deposit on a house, orders a bridal gown in silk and taffeta. The psychological instability - moderated in her early years by soothing daily routines of prayer, contact with nature, chores and nocturnal painting - now erupts into full-blown psychosis.

Moreau is the force that keeps you watching for more than two hours. She won one of the film's seven Césars from the French academy of cinema (it also won the prize for best film and for the wonderful photography by Laurent Brunet). She conveys without strain Séraphine's artistic intensity as well as her confusion, and suggests inner grace despite her hefty form.