At the Arthouse

Séraphine is a good example of French moviemaking

To fully understand how different the film cultures of France and the U.S. are, take a look at Séraphine, the biopic about Séraphine de Senlis, a French outsider artist (to use our current term for self-taught artists) of the 1920s and ‘30s. Director Martin Provost’s work is so patient, precise and understated that at times it feels severe. I can’t imagine a film with a similar sensibility even being made here, including as an independent film, but in France it won seven Caesars (their Oscar equivalent), including Best Picture and Best Actress.

Vive la difference, I suppose.

I would say that Belgian actress Yolande Moreau plays the title character, but “inhabits” is the better verb. Séraphine is a woman of few words; to a large extent Moreau’s performance consists of walking through the village and the surrounding fields with a forward lean, sometimes pushing a wheelbarrow, sometimes not. Very occasionally she stops for a look at the glory of God’s creation; at nature, that is. Like many outsider artists, Séraphine creates out of a religious vision; she has a heartfelt devotion to the Virgin Mary, and she feels that a guardian angel directs her hand when she paints.

At first it seems that the film wants us to pity her. The rigors of pre-World War I working class life are depicted in convincing detail. Séraphine is a cleaning woman and laundress—she hauls clothes in her wheelbarrow down to the river to wash them. And her patrons talk to her as if she were a child. Because she speaks so little, she doesn’t seem very smart, and it takes a while for the viewer to not patronize her as well, even as we see her at work on a painting. We expect that she’s working out of religious impulse, and may have no intellectual understanding of what she’s about.

We’re disabused of that notion when she meets the one person in the village capable of appreciating her work. Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) is a German art collector and gallery owner who just moved to the village from Paris. (Uhde is also based on a real life character.) Uhde had an avant-garde eye for art. He was an early collector and presenter of Picasso, and of the naifs (a term Uhde disapproves of) such as Henri Rousseau.

As soon as he sees Séraphine’s work, he knows that she’s gifted. But his praise gets her hackles up. “You think that because I clean your house that I’m not as smart as you,” she says, in what may be her longest utterance. Perhaps it’s this line of Séraphine’s that makes Uhde disapprove of the word “naïve.”

Despite her prickliness, Séraphine is in fact inspired by Uhde’s praise, and she begins painting with even more dedication. The film follows her as she realizes that she’s about to become famous, and then when she’s disappointed by Uhde’s disappearance during WWI. (He was a German in France, after all.) When Uhde finally returns, many years later, he finds that Séraphine has grown enormously as an artist. He’s going to represent her in Paris, and then she’ll be on her way. The film’s only real feel-good moment comes when Séraphine shows her enormous, beautiful canvases to the local townspeople, who are agog at what the cleaning lady has wrought. Apparently they’re the artist’s actual canvases. She never became famous, and her work isn’t well known. But how beautiful her nature paintings are. Even seen on a film screen, they’re alive in a mysterious way.

But just when she’s ready for her debut on the art world stage, history intervenes again. The Depression kills the art market. When Uhde tells her they’ll have to wait to put on her show, she literally loses her mind. She dons a wedding gown, and, now presumably a bride of Christ, is committed to the asylum where she lived until her death in 1942.

Director Provost doesn’t have any tricks up his sleeve. He doesn’t try to take us too deep inside Séraphine’s personal world. The connection between her enjoyment of nature and her paintings is strongly implied, but we see it objectively, from the outside. The film’s rigor may in fact cost it a few entertainment points, but it also grants it an unusual degree of authenticity. You believe that you’re watching the real Séraphine de Senlis, rather than an actor.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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