MOVIE REVIEW
Séraphine (2008)
Music Box Films
The act of painting is a visual one and therefore inherently cinematic. Artists are usually interesting individuals with complicated personal lives and dramatic outlooks — or so the stereotypes say. So movies about painters are visually and dramatically interesting. Except, of course, when they are not.
Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau) was a bonne à toute faire (a woman worker who could do anything in the home; literally, a jill-of-all-trades) in Senlis, a small town outside Paris, in the 1910s when she started working for Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German escaping the city life of Paris. They interacted as a bourgeois bohemian normally interacts with his cleaner, until he realized that she painted. As it happened, he was one of Europe's premier art critics, and so Séraphine's career was born.