The art of the matter
Renoir a lush, portrait of late painter’s life
The fields are pale green and bathed in sunlight. A young woman on a bicycle is wearing a jacket of pale rose. Later, when she is naked, her flesh has the same rose luminescence, “the velvety texture of a young girl’s skin,” as the famous artist says. He is fierce in a white beard and beret; a brush is taped to his crippled hands. He blends soft shades into scenes of dappled grass and voluptuous women lying naked in it. He asks them to arrange themselves as if they are floating.
These are the beauties of Renoir, a lovely motion picture in which not a lot actually happens, per se, but it looks good while it doesn’t.
Using works by the former art forger Guy Ribes (those are his hands you see painting), it is an impressionistic portrait of two great artists: the elderly PierreAuguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), a lion in winter, living out his days by ignoring the First World War and instead concentrating on finding the right shades of vermilion and sienna to capture the ripe fruits and lush women that engage his eye; and his son, young Jean Renoir (Vincent Rottiers), a handsome soldier back to convalesce from an injury and only beginning to become interested in the new field of cinema in which he will become a master.
Renoir looks like something that Jean Renoir would later direct — more A Day in the Country than The Rules of the Game, but having elements of each — which is part of the homage by director Gilles Bourdos. Unfortunately, Bourdos is no Renoir (père or fils), and the movie struggles to become the poetic commentary on art, war and love that was apparently intended.
Beautifully photographed by Mark Ping Bing Lee (In the Mood for Love), Renoir is nonetheless a successful portrayal of the artistic sensibility. It’s a dreamy and measured struggle. And near the end, when someone tells Jean Renoir, “The cinema isn’t for us French. It’s entertainment for the masses,” you find yourself knee-deep in several layers of irony, intended and otherwise.
Renoir, which is based on the book Le Tableau amoureux by Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s greatgrandson Jacques Renoir, is set on the Cote d’Azur in 1915, when Pierre-Auguste Renoir is near the end of his life. He’s both gracious and cranky, a demanding artist who has come to terms with his own grumpiness, but we can surmise from his surroundings that he has led a life of indulgence and dedication. He is surrounded by women — maids, housekeepers, many of them former models and therefore, probably, former mistresses — and by his youngest son, Claude Renoir (Thomas Doret), who wanders aimlessly across the wild fields and calls himself an orphan.
The routine is disrupted by the arrival of Andrée (Christa Theret, speaking of lush), a would-be actress and model who was recommended to Pierre-Auguste Renoir by his late wife.
“A girl from out of nowhere sent by a dead woman,” the artist says, but soon he is captivated by the rounded fullness of her body. “Titian would have worshipped her” he muses. “Flesh. That’s all that matters.” You get the feeling that if his wife were still alive, Andrée would be sent packing swiftly.
Into this tableau comes Jean Renoir, back from the war with an injured leg and similarly intrigued by his father’s new model. It’s an old story chez Renoir and you can tell from scenes of Jean and Claude examining the portrait gallery of their lives that Andrée is not the first of dad’s models to insinuate herself into their lives. “You’ll end up in the old man’s bed too,” Claude yells at her. “Like all of them.”
But Andrée is a spirited young woman with other dreams: She wants to be an actress, and she thinks Jean might become a filmmaker so he can employ her. It’s a rather prosaic storyline, but it’s helped along by the film’s subtext: We know what happened to Jean (although perhaps not to Andrée), so his struggles with his father, and with his position as the son of a famous and distant man, are enriched in the telling.
“You can’t explain a painting,” Pierre-Auguste says. “You have to feel it.” Renoir the film has the same sensibility: a dreamy palette that invites us to swoon.