Seraphine

I suspect that not many people will have heard of Seraphine Louis (or Seraphine de Senlis as she's probably best known), let alone seen any of her paintings. Amid the (male) heavyweights of early 20th century art she barely merits a footnote, and yet her work - on the evidence of this film - has both a deceptive simplicity and a vivid beauty, with jewel-like colours bursting from her canvases. The film makes the time-honoured connection between creativity and madness, with the latter refracted through her intense religious devotion (though that doesn't prevent her "appropriating" melted candle wax from the church) From the start she's an eccentric figure, though perfectly harmless, while a remark by the Mother Superior of the convent where she grew up indicates that she has a history of mental illness. When Wilhelm Uhde compares her to Van Gogh in being ahead of her time, the viewer makes another connection too. It's never clear when or why she began painting - at the start of the film she's already squirreling away materials for her next work - though her affinity with nature helps explain the subject matter. The film also emphasises her ordinariness. She's a rather dumpy figure, with a slightly odd walk, and the camera spends a lot of time gazing at her hands, which are a working woman's hands. Fleshy, with stubby fingers, they are the very antithesis of what we might consider an artist's hands, and yet we see those fingers smoothing paint onto canvas, playing as much a role as her paintbrushes. Despite the stunning art, she could have remained completely undiscovered but the film's other key character, the German art dealer Uhde is instantly entranced. Unfortunately war, class and economics all conspire over the years to thwart any recognition for Seraphine (when Uhde and his sister are forced to flee France at the start of WWI, they take a Rousseau painting with them and leave everything else behind), and ultimately results in her final incarceration in an asylum. It's a slow and episodic film, requiring a certain amount of patience though the pacing does produce a suitably surprising reveal of the first painting that we see. Much can be forgiven for the glorious art that the film shows to us.