Renoir

The moment the film opens, you are immersed in the countryside of southern France. The colours are warm and very expressive. In fact the film is shot very much as a painting in itself, which is quite beautiful. All natural light. You want to relax and soak it all in, but there is a thread of tension that moves throughout. As "the boss" says, life is like a cork and you have to follow it where it leads you. For Renoir himself, the flesh and its immediacy is all important. It must be seized and exalted in that very moment. For his son Jean, he feels the need to go back to war, a higher calling as it were. He falls for the spell of his father's model Andrée. You constantly feel the tension between the privilege of the "Chateau" and the needs of the flesh for life to continue. A visual experience.

Renoir was a surprise for me in that it covered in some depth aspects of the life of both Renoir the painter and his son Jean, the filmmaker. This beautifully shot film, set in the south of France, will surely appeal to anyone interested in either Renoir--or both.

One idea which popped into my head while watching this was that Renoir the painter was something of a womanizer, in that he ended up having affairs with his models. This makes me wonder what the #METOO crowd would say about that. Or maybe it´s okay when someone has been dead for a century? My own view is that works of art should not be shunned on the basis of moral judgment of their creators. I was shocked, for example, when Hachette recently refused to publish Woody Allen´s memoir. Would they also advocate for destroying his brilliant films?

Anyway, I recommend this film. It is slow, but intentionally so.

Painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet) is an ancient man by 1915. It is WWI, and his two eldest sons, Pierre and Jean (Vincent Rottiers), are at war, while his youngest, Claude (Kid with a Bike star Thomas Doret), just a boy, plays around the estate, claiming to be an orphan (his mother dead and his father an old man). Along comes a beautiful young woman (Christa Theret) who wishes to model for Renoir. Her beauty inspires the old man. Soon, Jean arrives home and begins an affair with the model (whose name is Andrée Heuschling, but who would later change her name to Catherine Hessling and star in many of Renoir's early films). This is, above all, just a very pretty movie. Very fitting, given its subject. Alexandre Desplat also provides a very gorgeous score. The story isn't hefty, but it's good. The acting is good throughout. France submitted this for the Academy Awards this year, bypassing the much more popular (and frankly better) Blue Is the Warmest Color, but Renoir is a worthy film, as well.

Greetings again from the darkness. Admittedly, I expect more from independent films since there is usually no committee of producers sucking the life out of the filmmaker's vision. While writer/director Gilles Bourdos teams with Cinematographer Ping Bin Lee to deliver a film that carries the visual beauty of its subject's paintings, it somehow offers little else.

Veteran French actor Michel Bouquet captures the essence of a 74 year old Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a master Impressionistic artist. By this time (1915), Renoir is in constant pain and continues painting despite his gnarled hands courtesy of severe arthritis. He has relocated to Cote D'Azur (the French Riviera) to leave in peace with nature and the warmer weather. His estate is gorgeous and provides the backdrops for many paintings. We meet his newest model, 15 year old Andree Heuschling (Christa Theret). Her spirit inspires not just Renoir the artist, but also his son Jean (Vincent Ruttiers), sent home to recover from his WWI injuries.

Both father and son seem to objectify the beautiful and spirited Andree, neither being capable of an adult and equal personal relationship. The frustration with this movie stems from its unwillingness to offer anything other than observations of its characters. It meanders through days with no real purpose or insight. This despite having subjects that include one of the greatest artists of all-time and his son, who went on to become a world famous movie director. The story, if there is one, just kind of lays there flat, surrounded by beautiful colors and textures.

Auguste Renoir died in 1919, but earlier that year managed to visit the Louvre and view his own paintings hanging in the majestic halls. Jean Renoir married Andree and cast her in his first silent films (as Catherine Hessling). When the films flopped, they divorced. She went on to a life of obscure poverty, and he directed two of the greatest films in history: Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game.

Alexandre Desplat provides another fine score, leaving us lacking only a story or point to the film. To learn much about Pierre-Auguste Renoir, it is recommended to read the biography his son Jean wrote.

Appropriately enough, about the world's most famous Impressionist painter.

While it's definitely not for those who strongly favor conventionally plotted drama or fast action, RENOIR consists of immediate realism and puts you right with the Renoir clan on the French Riviera. It's the sort of film that could easily have been made overly artsy and dull, but it's neither.

The entire story takes place in 1915, toward the end of Renoir's life. The relationship between model Andrée Heuschling and son Jean Renoir is, in many ways, more the subject of the story than the painter himself, yet Renoir himself is indispensable as "the boss," a sort of god-like backdrop to the entire cast and story. Having said that, I must add that there is a fair amount on Renoir's artistic processes, and his philosophizing can be applied to all sorts of art-forms as well as painting. One of RENOIR's strongest aspects is its portrayal of a man who is obsessed with his work and has one thing which utterly engulfs and consumes him.

Like many French films, RENOIR succeeds in breaking all sorts of rules. Among them:

--The plot is meandering and somewhat slice-of-life but still gripping;

--Andrée, the "girl from nowhere," and free but neglected youngest son Coco are characters that beg to be developed further, but at the same time, perhaps it's better that they remain mysterious;

--Lots of female nudity without it seeming the least bit gratuitous: After all, the subject is an artist who often painted naked girls;

--The mood is a successful mesh of somberness, poignancy, and (often laugh-out-loud) humor.

Just about every artsy cliché could be applied to this film, but suffice it to say that it is a beautiful experience. Even simple colors come alive here for the audience as they did for Renoir himself. I'm a word person who's never been a big painting aficionado, but this film made me see the visual arts in a whole new light and may even have converted me to some extent. The soundtrack--quiet, unobtrusive piano scores in the background--also does a great deal to carry this film.