Séraphine movie review & film summary (2009)

"Seraphine" arrives from France as the year's most honored film, winner of seven Cesars from the French Academy, including best film and best actress. The actress is Yolande Moreau, who combines, as some people do, a plain face with moments of beauty. Notice her fleeting little smile of complicity as she steals fuel from candles before the Virgin. Moreau plays Seraphine as a straight-ahead charger, a little stooped, marching always with energy, plunging into work, not saying much, shy, but very much who she is. Her physical bearing tells us what we need to know about her mental state.

Her life is changed forever when Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) comes as a boarder to the home she works in; it offers a pastoral setting in Senlis, her hometown near Chantilly, and she observes that Uhde needs relief from stress. He's a famous German art critic and a Paris gallery owner, already famous as an early champion of Picasso and Braque; he discovered Rousseau. He glimpses one of Seraphine's little paintings of apples, asks to see more, is convinced she is a primitive genius. (In the film, we appear to see her actual paintings.)

Seraphine observes everything, worries about Uhde, sees that he is sad, offers him some of her homemade "power wine," tells him that when she is sad, she walks in the forest and touches the trees. We even see Seraphine climbing one, in her late 50s, for the view.

She lives in bitter poverty, hounded by her landlady, doing laundry for a few francs, doling out her coins at the local store to buy canvas and the paints she cannot mix herself. Uhde admires her work, which she cannot believe, gives her some money, makes her some promises and then disappears: As a German, he flees France at the outset of World War I. Ten years after the war, he and his sister return to Senlis. He assumes Seraphine is dead. At a town hall exhibition by local artists, he sees a work unmistakably hers, but larger and more finished. He is overwhelmed, as many others would be.