Seraphine [DVD] [2008]

This film, which has won many French Academy awards including best picture and best actress, tells the true story of Seraphine Louis, a middle-aged cleaner and maid, who, living alone in the town of Serlis in great poverty, is driven through religious fervour to paint. She mixes pigments from natural elements - pondweed, flowers, blood from the butcher's shop, wax from the church candles - and her paintings, which are not of religious subjects but of trees, flowers and fruit, the things she sees around her, are colourful, beautifully crafted and quite original. Quite by chance a distinguished German connoisseur, collector and dealer, Wilhelm Uhde, sees one of her paintings. From there and over a long period of time her story develops, not straightforwardly (the First War intervenes, Uhde has to flee France, he assumes she has died but finds her again almost by chance) but eventually productively, so that her work is recognised and bought by collectors, but there is a cost for her - or perhaps her own peculiar nature works itself out - and her personal story does not end happily. Now her paintings are highly valued and, as Seraphine de Senlis, she is regarded as an important artist.

It is an astonishing story, very faithfully told in this often beautiful film. Much of the film is slow-paced, entirely appropriately for its subject, but it does not drag. The visual composition and cinematography are marvellous. The world of pre-War and post-War rural France is convincingly recreated. But the greatest glory of the film is the beautifully understated yet powerful performance of Yolande Moreau, who captures the curious nature of Seraphine - relgiously ecstatic, passionate about her painting, naive, occasionally unexpectedly insightful, direct and determined, very vulnerable - completely absorbingly. This is a very unusual film about a very unusual woman. All the other performances are good and fully worthy of the central one - and the film does tell a very good story, though it is in many ways a sad one. It is not difficult to see why it appealed so much to the French judges, and it is certainly a distinguished and compelling film.

It is a wonderful film - with wonderful filming and a wonderful interpretation by Yolande Moreau as Seraphine Louis!
The colours are important not only in Seraphine's paintings but in the filming as well. You really get to understand how hard life was for her. And yet she was able to use the nights to paint wonderful paintings.
The film made an enormous impact on me, I felt really worn-out after the film finished, so many emotions were to be handled. Tears and some comic, understanding the tragedy and the beauty of her life.
Highly recommended!

Seraphine is a magnificent film of what was to me an unknown French artist,Seraphine Louis,an impoverished cleaner,who was an extraordinary naïve painter.Self-taught,inspired by her religious faith,she had an inner compulsion to express divinely inspired visions through painting,reflections of a psyche walking a tightrope between ecstasy and mental illness.Alongside her arduous day jobs,Seraphine(Yolande Moreau) painted by candlelight,largely in secret isolation,until her considerable body of work was discovered by William Uhde(Ulrich Tukur),German art collector,who was mesmerized.

For most of her life, Séraphine painted in total obscurity, scrimping together enough money from the various types of menial labor on which she subsisted to buy a few art supplies. She mixed these with pigments of her own devising, colors distilled from plant and animal sources familiar to Séraphine from years of tending flocks and other outdoor work. These vibrant colors, which struck Uhde's eye as so unusual, are one of the hallmarks of her work. The subject of almost all of her paintings is the flora of the region where she lived, generally viewed from close up and refracted through the bizarre lens of Séraphine's inner vision. She claimed that heavenly voices directed her to paint, visions that later became delusions strong enough to land her in a mental asylum in Clermont, where she died after a long incarceration. These plants, often dotted and striped like caterpillars or other insects, seem to quiver with life, making them seem more like the fauna of a psychotic landscape.

His support had barely begun to lift her horizons when he was forced to leave France in August 1914; the war between France and Germany had made him an unwelcome outsider in Senlis, much as Séraphine was, given her eccentric persona. They only reestablished contact in 1927 when Uhde - back in France and living in Chantilly - visited an exhibition of local artists in Senlis and, seeing Séraphine's work, realized that she had survived and her art had flourished. Under Uhde's patronage, Séraphine began painting large canvases as large as two meters high, and she achieved prominence as the naïve painter of her day. In 1929, Uhde organized an exhibition,"Painters of the Sacred Heart," that featured Séraphine's art, launching her into a period of financial success she had never known - and was ill prepared to manage. Then, in 1930, with the effects of the Great Depression destroying the finances of her patrons, Uhde had no choice except to stop buying her paintings.

In 1932, Séraphine was admitted for "chronic psychosis" to the psychiatric ward of a geriatric hospital at Clermont, where her artistry found no outlet. Although Uhde reported that she had died in 1934, Séraphine actually lived until 1942 in a hospital annex at Villers-sous-Erquery, where she died friendless and alone[. (Some sources still state she died in 1934.) She was buried in a common grave.Yolande Moreau's performance touches the heart, witness the scene in the special asylum when she touches the chair on the balcony of her room.Ulrich Tukur(Lives of Others) is superb as Uhde. If I have one criticism it's that I thought many of the interior scenes were too darkly lit,although this enhances realism,I couldn't see the paintings with enough clarity.A winner of 7 French Academy awards,with best actress and best picture.