Avoiding the Biopic Pitfalls, Glorying in Fine Art and Acting
The potential pitfalls of the biopic are many: a tendency to hagiography being the chief one, but also out-and-out histrionics and the “great moments embodied” syndrome. I’ll never forget in the silly “Coco & Igor” a few years ago when Ms. Chanel points to a bottle of perfume and shouts, “I’ll take No. 5!” (The bottle was miraculously pre-labeled with the familiar commercial logo, to boot.)
At a time when “42” is making the rounds sanctifying the Jackie Robinson story and raking in box-office bucks, the French biopic “Renoir” is flying under the radar. It’s a good, though not great, movie that avoids most of the traps of the genre.
If anything, “Renoir” is unexpectedly gritty. It depicts the French Impressionist painter’s last years, long after he became a famous artist, living on the Riviera and attended by a gaggle of servant women who sometimes pose for him. His hands are horribly gnarled by rheumatoid arthritis and he is carted around in a kind of open sedan chair by the women.
Along comes a beautiful red-haired stranger, Andrée (Christa Theret), an aspiring actress who soon becomes as much muse as model for the artist’s late, great nudes. Meanwhile, Renoir’s son Jean (Vincent Rottiers)—later to become a celebrated filmmaker in his own right—returns home from the front wounded and falls under Andrée’s spell.
“Renoir” is a story of shifting emotional tides, like the undulating brushstrokes of Renoir’s canvas. Father and son compete for each other’s affection, and for Andrée’s. She struggles to find a place for herself in a closed, idealized world of beauty where, paradoxically, women are used and discarded. And that world of beauty is an increasingly fragile bubble invaded by the reality of war and aging.
The movie is seriously weighed down by the first third of its nearly two hours: heavy on exposition, stares, and innuendo. A youngest son, Coco (Thomas Doret), seems to live on the periphery of his family in a state of distrust and rebellion, but the reasons are unclear. How Andrée came to Renoir, somehow involving his dead wife, is also obscure.
The film steps perilously close to some of the pitfalls. Here’s Renoir explaining his painting technique as he probably never did in real life; there’s Jean playing with a prototype motion picture device. Forty minutes feel like an hour, and you start appreciating Theret’s ample natural endowments more as a distraction than plot point.
But just then something of this intense father-son-lover dynamic starts to coalesce, as does the power of Renoir’s vision of sensuality as a life force. (“Flesh!” he cries ecstatically on more than one occasion, and bitterly denounces the critics who compare his nudes to “decomposing flesh.”)
What ultimately makes “Renoir” work is the astonishing performance in the title role by Michel Bouquet, an award-winning stage and screen actor in France—at 78, the same age as Pierre-Auguste Renoir when he died. Comparisons to Daniel Day-Lewis as “Lincoln” would not be unfounded. Both have incomparable ability to convey emotion through their eyes. In Bouquet’s case, we see the painter’s childlike innocence, physical pain, cruelty, bewilderment at a changing world he cannot control, and a visceral need to consume the beauty he surrounds himself with.
There is a splendid line that cannot repeated here, an answer Renoir gives when asked what he will do when he can no longer use his hands to paint. And there is all that splendid art, against which director Gilles Bourdos does not try to compete, but rather complements. It’s a smart move.
“Renoir” is rated R for “sequences of art-related nudity and brief profanity.”
At a time when “42” is making the rounds sanctifying the Jackie Robinson story and raking in box-office bucks, the French biopic “Renoir” is flying under the radar. It’s a good, though not great, movie that avoids most of the traps of the genre.
If anything, “Renoir” is unexpectedly gritty. It depicts the French Impressionist painter’s last years, long after he became a famous artist, living on the Riviera and attended by a gaggle of servant women who sometimes pose for him. His hands are horribly gnarled by rheumatoid arthritis and he is carted around in a kind of open sedan chair by the women.
Along comes a beautiful red-haired stranger, Andrée (Christa Theret), an aspiring actress who soon becomes as much muse as model for the artist’s late, great nudes. Meanwhile, Renoir’s son Jean (Vincent Rottiers)—later to become a celebrated filmmaker in his own right—returns home from the front wounded and falls under Andrée’s spell.
“Renoir” is a story of shifting emotional tides, like the undulating brushstrokes of Renoir’s canvas. Father and son compete for each other’s affection, and for Andrée’s. She struggles to find a place for herself in a closed, idealized world of beauty where, paradoxically, women are used and discarded. And that world of beauty is an increasingly fragile bubble invaded by the reality of war and aging.
The movie is seriously weighed down by the first third of its nearly two hours: heavy on exposition, stares, and innuendo. A youngest son, Coco (Thomas Doret), seems to live on the periphery of his family in a state of distrust and rebellion, but the reasons are unclear. How Andrée came to Renoir, somehow involving his dead wife, is also obscure.
The film steps perilously close to some of the pitfalls. Here’s Renoir explaining his painting technique as he probably never did in real life; there’s Jean playing with a prototype motion picture device. Forty minutes feel like an hour, and you start appreciating Theret’s ample natural endowments more as a distraction than plot point.
But just then something of this intense father-son-lover dynamic starts to coalesce, as does the power of Renoir’s vision of sensuality as a life force. (“Flesh!” he cries ecstatically on more than one occasion, and bitterly denounces the critics who compare his nudes to “decomposing flesh.”)
What ultimately makes “Renoir” work is the astonishing performance in the title role by Michel Bouquet, an award-winning stage and screen actor in France—at 78, the same age as Pierre-Auguste Renoir when he died. Comparisons to Daniel Day-Lewis as “Lincoln” would not be unfounded. Both have incomparable ability to convey emotion through their eyes. In Bouquet’s case, we see the painter’s childlike innocence, physical pain, cruelty, bewilderment at a changing world he cannot control, and a visceral need to consume the beauty he surrounds himself with.
There is a splendid line that cannot repeated here, an answer Renoir gives when asked what he will do when he can no longer use his hands to paint. And there is all that splendid art, against which director Gilles Bourdos does not try to compete, but rather complements. It’s a smart move.
“Renoir” is rated R for “sequences of art-related nudity and brief profanity.”