French love letter
A new film tells the tale of two Renoirs — and the muse in the middle. By Mark Hudson
YOU get girls on bicycles everywhere. But there’s something about this particular girl — wheeling along a lane in the parched landscape of the Midi, with sunlight glinting through the trees — that feels particularly French. Her billowing skirt suggests the early 20th century, while her round “granny” sunglasses feel more ’60s.
Even when she passes the effigy of a soldier in First World War German uniform hanging from a tree and arrives at a country house peopled with servants in Belle Époque garb, she continues moving to her own impulsive rhythms: a teenage girl discovering her powers as a woman, observing the world with a wilful, pouting scepticism.
Here in this house, she encounters not one, but two iconically French artists: Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, now in frail old age, for whom she has come to pose; and his son Jean, on leave from active service in the war, and not yet embarked on the career that will make him one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century.
“When I found out about this woman who was able to make a link between the father and the son, between painting and the cinema, I realised I had a perfect subject,” says director Gilles Bourdos of his film, Renoir (to be released in SA later this year).
The woman is Andrée Heuschling, the older Renoir’s last great muse, and the younger Renoir’s first wife, who starred in several of his early films.
In real life, she came to the house as a replacement for her elder sister, who had proved unsatisfactory as a model, and at the recommendation of Matisse. Bourdos’s film sets such factual considerations aside, with the enigmatic Andrée claiming to have been sent by Renoir’s long-dead wife.
“A girl with no name, sent by a dead woman,” murmurs the elderly painter, played by French actor Michel Bouquet. Embodied by rising star Christa Theret, Andrée disrupts the placid routine of the house, stripping when asked, arousing the jealousy of the servants and the repressed passion of Jean (Vincent Rottiers).
“She’s a very modern character,” says Theret. “She speaks very spontaneously. It wasn’t easy at that time for a young woman from her background to be free. The housekeeper tells her, ‘You came here as a model, but you’ll end up a servant’. But she won’t accept that.”
Renoir is now the least regarded of the Impressionists. His long-haired girls and amply proportioned matrons tend to be written off as sentimental by critics, though, as Bourdos points out: “In France, Renoir is still a very popular painter, particularly with ordinary people.”
The status of his son Jean remains undimmed, certainly with critics. Films such as La Règle du Jeu and La Grande Illusion regularly appear in polls of the 10 greatest films of all time.
Bourdos’s film’s conceit is to film a moment in the declining years of Renoir père in the lyrical, poetic style of Renoir fils: with the white Midi dust blowing up into the sunlight, the camera moving around and through the open doors and windows of the old painter’s studio, creating a sense — typical of Renoir’s films — of being indoors and outdoors simultaneously.
In the film, the older Renoir inducts the younger into his fatalistic world-view, indifferent to ambition and morality.
Meanwhile, Andrée’s interest in the family is prompted by something far more primal than gold-digging. As a woman, she knows instinctively what’s good for her.
“She’s a go-getter,” says Theret. “She wants to transcend her situation, and she realises this family can help her do that. But she’s not scheming. She’s quite naive.”
While the film follows the popular notion that Andrée pushed Jean towards the cinema to further her own acting ambitions, the real-life Jean can have been nothing like as passive as he appears here.
“Jean made 15 films in the ’30s alone,” says Renoir expert Christopher Faulkner. “You’ve got to have a lot of get-up-and-go to be able to do that.”
Andrée starred in Renoir’s first six films, under the name Catherine Hessling, and had smaller roles in the next three, but their marriage and her inclusion in his films ended in 1928.
“She wanted the high life,” says Faulkner. “She had little real interest in acting or in looking after their son. Jean inherited great wealth on his father’s death in 1919. He used the money to finance his career in cinema, which gave him stability. But she never found that. She married again after they split, but did very little real acting.”
Finally, though, Renoir is a love letter to a certain idea of French culture, which hopes, along the way, to reinstate a derided artist.
“Picasso and Matisse both loved Renoir,” says Bourdos. “Because he keeps the human figure as the central element. His art is about the body. There’s nothing mystical about it. It’s about the pleasure of being alive, here and now.” — © The Daily Telegraph