The artist met the florist Martha (Cécile de France) on the street and invited her to become a model. The film begins with a mise-en-scene: the artist paints a portrait of a girl, with his back to her. This know-how of Bonnard: writing without looking, or this method of direction, the film does not explain. But this first session will end in a hot bed, Martha will become the constant heroine of Bonnard’s paintings; soon there will be enough to organize the exhibition that made him famous.
You can understand the ardor of a 26-year-old artist, it is more difficult to understand a girl who has fallen in love with a man of indeterminate age and lacking charisma. And in the future, the action will revolve around his adventures as Don Juan, bathing naked in the Seine, a teenage game of outdoor tag, and the suicide attempts of students who are in love with him – for all of this, 45 years-. The old actor Vincent Macken seems too heavy.
However, this mystery of the love betrayal that inspired the artist is what the author wants to solve. Surround the hero with real characters: here is his patron Misi (Anouk Grinber), his new lover, the student René, who is ready to open her veins because of the doubts of Pierre, who promised to marry (Stacy Martin), his comrades. in the “Nabi” group Claude Monet and Jean Edouard Vuillard (André Marcon and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet)… But all this seems like a retelling of Flaubert’s novel in kindergarten: the complex seems primitive, probably a parody. Claude Monet stands out here only because he is fanatically obsessed with water lilies and is willing to skip a fried chicken dinner for them. Misy appears as a hysterical predator, a snake with a stinging tongue, which is especially comical in the episode of the women’s confrontation in the middle of the Seine. Bonnard’s two muses, Martha and René, exist in a tragic vaudevillian mode: both suffer from Pierre’s infidelity, both burst into sobs, become hysterical, become like raging furies, both constantly strive to drown. Pierre himself seems like a victim, forced, obeying the call of the flesh, to confront absurd creatures who want to take him at any price. The film turned out not so much to be sexy as to be sexist.
The discrepancy between the age of the performers and the age of their characters is to some extent explained by the vastness of the action, which covered the period from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century: towards the end, the heroes already seem , quite rightly, senile elderly.
Having set out to reveal the secret of the painter’s intricate relationships with his women, the authors were never able to show this personality in a convincing way. Here he whispers with an evidently dry brush on the canvas. Here he receives love from him in a fragile attic, where there is not even a bathtub (this enameled thing will play an important role in his work). But now he buys his youngest lover a luxurious palace in Italy, promising to marry immediately, but immediately paints another canvas with his beloved Martha. He juggles the fate of close women, unable to choose between them, and this could become the subject of a serious psychological drama. All biographical films about people of art show “from what rubbish poetry grows”, but it is difficult to sympathize with the heroes of this film due to the strange infantilism of the dramaturgy and direction.
However, when it comes to a dubbed film, the viewer finds himself in a difficult situation: it is impossible to determine whose credit is whose. Here Renée, feeling out of place in the love triangle, presents the following text to her failed husband: “I’m just a naive student who reignited the extinguished fire of your passion.” And this is how Pierre’s friends console Marta, exhausted by despair: “He knows that his work is inseparable from his feelings for you!” Any editor would have eliminated those dialogues: people don’t express themselves so pompously. But try to discover who these lines belong to: to the imagination of the French screenwriter Marc Abdelnour with the collaboration of Martin Provost, or to the author of the Russian text, Lyubov Serdyukova. And who turned numerous scenes of frantic sobbing between women and men into a shrill, bass-heavy operetta: the French actors or their Russian colleagues, who for some reason decided to take revenge on them.
