My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Saturday, March 27, 2010

Who's going to make a great film about outsider art? : Seraphine

"Seraphine" got some very strong reviews, and it's interesting to a degree as a biopic about a real outsider artist, Seraphine, a social outcast with religious obsessions who scrubs floors for a living and paints to save her soul (her guardian angel told her to paint her visions). It happens that she's hired to clean for a leading Parisian art dealer, champion off Rousseau and Picasso, who learns of her talent and shows her strange works in his gallery. Though she did sell her art, her mental condition deteriorated and she spent her last years in an insane asylum. It seems to me that the movie may have played down her insanity, as she seems mainly eccentric (wearing a bridal dress and giving away possessions) and self-destructive (spending wildly) rather than a menace to anyone else. I wonder if that was so? Her actual artwork - which the movie uses (at least images of her artwork) - doesn't do much for me, all closely patterned images of flowers, blossoms, fruit. Others disagree. Have to wonder how many other great "outsiders" remain still undiscovered, not having the good fortune, in a sense, of scrubbing floors for an art dealer. Did his patronage make her famous, or her talent? Or both? In a funny way, this film makes a good bookend with the much more commercial Coco Before Chanel: both involving extreme talent exhibited by an unlikely and unfortunate provincial French woman, same country setting, nearly the same time period, in both cases the woman championed by a powerful man - but then the conclusions are so different, Chanel going on to fortune and Seraphine not. Also Seraphine and her patron both struggle through life and particularly through the war (WWI). I wish I liked this movie more, but the pacing was glacial and the story line felt curiously removed from Seraphine, we really end up knowing little about her other than her art. Remember the outsider artist in Junebug? He was more interesting, and scary.

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