"The Bonnards" in cinemas | Light without any shadow?

This director has proven time and again that he can tell unusual stories through seemingly trivial details and precisely observed details. With "Séraphine," Martin Provost created a completely unusual film in 2008 about the art collector Wilhelm Uhde, played with great intensity by Ulrich Tukur. Upon arriving in Paris, he notices at some point: his cleaning lady is painting, and in a way he's never seen before! An outsider to the art world – similar to the customs officer Rousseau with his naive paintings? Unfortunately, Séraphine's story doesn't end well. Uhde initially supports her, but then the First World War comes and he loses track of her. He eventually finds her again, still painting, and supports her with purchases. But her sudden success completely disrupts the life of this simple woman. Her behavior becomes increasingly erratic, and she ends up in a closed psychiatric hospital, where she remains until her death. Whether she actually went crazy or just seemed too eccentric to those around her remains unclear.

Unfortunately, Provost has now attempted to tell the same story again, focusing on the painter Pierre Bonnard and his partner Marthe. Marthe was initially his more or less random model, but they remained together and married after 30 years. Bonnard painted her repeatedly over a period of 50 years, appearing in 374 paintings, 341 of them as a nude. Was she his muse, did his obsession with the woman with the androgynous charisma remain, or was it even due to the painter's frugality that he painted Marthe so often? All of this seems unclear. While we often see Pierre and Marthe running naked in nature, they clearly have the mentality of early hippies, but fundamentally they remain strangers to us. This is certainly also due to the fact that Marthe kept herself and her origins secret, not even revealing her name. Above all, she was jealous. She even destroyed Bonnard's paintings of other women herself. This could be the dramatic spark for a chamber play between painter and model, but it is all too rare.

Although Guillaume Schiffman's camera succeeds in creating a uniquely atmospheric visual language, it takes almost two hours before it becomes clear what the director is attempting here: to translate the aesthetics of Bonnard's painting into a film about him. This only succeeds intermittently, however, partly because the specific characteristics of this aesthetic are never truly developed. This gives one ample opportunity to be annoyed by the infantile German distribution title "The Bonnards – Paint and Love" – in French, the film is simply called "Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe."

Such stories about painters and their models are popular. Auguste Rodin, a womanizer according to legend, also had a touching relationship with his model, Rose, who was neither beautiful nor intelligent nor kind—yet they shared something we don't know. In 2017, Jacques Doillon shot "Auguste Rodin," starring Vincent Lindon. But this important film was more than the story of an erotic entanglement; it explored the creation of such famous works of art as "The Thinker" and "Balzac."

The idea of ​​the film: A painter and his model inhabit the world of images created by Bonnard for decades.

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Strangely enough, that doesn't happen here. The special aesthetic of Bonnard's paintings, a man not everyone knows and who, as a painter, would have to be introduced, is left aside as a topic. Vincent Macaigne's performance as Bonnard is so hesitant that he almost seems like a corner-person in his own film. Cécile de France's Marthe may be more expressive, but we still learn almost nothing about her, except that she is excessively jealous and initially suffers from many health problems (asthma, weak heart). The doctor tells Bonnard she will die young. The subject is never taken up again, and 50 years later she is still alive, but mentally disturbed, so Bonnard has to care for her.

There's an episode in her life that catches our attention: She begins to paint, and does so in a completely independent way. At this time, Bonnard is living with another model, and Stacy Martin, known from Lars von Trier's "Nymphomaniac," gives the film, which had been rather leisurely until then, an incredible burst of energy with her appearance. But then she takes her own life, and the film reverts to its old tranquility, which is indistinguishable from boredom.

The idea of ​​the film: A painter and his model inhabit the world of images created by Bonnard for decades (Bonnard died in 1947, Marthe five years before him). It could have been magnificent, but it barely works. Is it because everyone involved was only subparly motivated? Perhaps this is also because we don't get to know Bonnard's paintings well enough in this film.

It seems to me that Martin Provost is misunderstanding something crucial: Bonnard is not a mere late Impressionist. Rather, he is attempting to translate the symbolism of Mallarmé's poetry into his own visual language. His paintings always appear astonishingly bright (he lived above Cannes on the Côte d'Azur), but unlike his fatherly friend Monet, he does not paint the experienced moment in nature; instead, he attempts to stage the "ideal moment," often working for months to prepare it. Famous paintings such as "White Interior" are elaborate experimental arrangements preceded by hundreds of sketches. This is missing from Martin Provost's approach to the peculiar painter Bonnard, who did not paint light, but sought to express the idea of ​​light. Throughout his life, he worked without an easel, rejecting any frame for his canvases, which were kept in rolls in his studio. He rejected any kind of conventional limitation.

Bonnard produced a sequence of color patches, which he then combined in a second step to connect with the passing of time. His famous painting "Studio with Mimosas" therefore consists almost entirely of yellow paint, large and small dots, whose composition aspires to the aspirations of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." Successfully? That would have been a question that could have given this film, which revels too much in bohemian bliss, its specific weight.

What is the life-price that art demands of the artist? The painter called it the viewer's submission to the picture. Provost's Bonnard film is far from such a compelling claim.

"The Bonnards: Painting and Loving," Belgium, France 2023. Directed and written by Martin Provost. Starring: Cécile de France, Vincent Macaigne, and Stacy Martin. 123 min. Now in theaters.