DRAMA; 2hr 3min (French with subtitles)
STARRING: Vincent Macaigne, Cécile de France
Artistic licence: Macaigne (foreground) and de France
Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard (Macaigne) is a creature of impulse in writer-director Martin Provost’s own picturesque impression. When not wedded to his easel (i.e., hardly ever), 26-year-old Pierre is apt to carpe his diem with both hands, falling hard for the woman who becomes his partner, model and muse (a peppery de France as Marthe de Méligny) the first time he paints her, in 1893. Seamstress Marthe is a dark horse who lies about her name and her family and wants no part of Pierre’s artistic Parisian milieu. No matter, Pierre is entranced, setting up a house with Marthe in southeastern France, tending to her asthma attacks and capturing her image at every opportunity.
Moving on to 1914, the sheen of newness has faded. Marthe is convinced that Pierre has been unfaithful with society pianist, Misia Sert (Anouk Grinberg), who, aside from being an ego-monster, is arguably the most awful lunch guest imaginable. By 1918, Pierre has moved on to an impressionable young model (Stacy Martin as Renée) whom Marthe, languidly immortalised on canvas, grimly resigned in life, invites to her and Pierre’s idyllic country home. Their ménage à trois is a fiasco in the making throughout which Pierre paints on, the studied luxuriance of his work at striking variance with the emotional chaos he causes.
As the primary eyes of their bygone age, artists were revered to an extreme that all but guaranteed adolescent self indulgence. The bond between Pierre and Marthe, and his celebration of her untameable spirit that was key to it, would endure until her death in 1942 at age 73. If there is one takeaway from Provost’s clear-eyed anatomising of the vagaries of their exacting relationship, it’s that the partner of a celebrated painter needs every shred of that spirit to survive.
