Set on the French Riviera in the summer of 1915 Jean Renoir -- son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste -- returns home to convalesce after being wounded in World War I. At his side is Andre a young woman who rejuvenates enchants and inspires both father and son.
Review
Renoir (France 2012 112 min)
Gille Bourdos uses the wellknown stories of the painter father PierreAuguste and the filmmaker son Jean Renoir for a film that is at once breathtaking spectacle and a profound anatomy of the impulses and values of art. The film was one of my highlights at this year's Palm Springs International Film Festival.
The plot presents the 74yearold veteran painter (Michel Bouquet) and his ravishing new 15yearold model Andree Heuschling (Christa Theret) enjoying their opulent country estate while WW I pounds the humanity outside. Mark Lee PingBin shoots the interiors with classic Dutch light and shadow but the exteriors in the unbridled luminosity of Impressionism. Here Renoir explains that structure comes from colour not form and he refuses to use black. That summarizes the painter's Impressionism it finds reality in what he makes of the outside world not what it firmly may be. His swirls of rosy chub continues his celebration of the young "velvet" flesh despite the war's flensing and destruction of the flesh beyond the estate and his age's grotesque gnarl and ruin of his bones. His painting days like his valiant denial of death are limited.
Son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) returns from the front with a symbol of the reality his father rejects an open wound. The family has a variety of open wounds from the loss of the boys' mother and the favoured modelnanny Gabrielle to the sons' resentment of their father's aloofness. The cut to the bone represents the reality Renoir's fleshy ladies and painted pommes reject. Vincent's convalescence goes beyond the flesh gap to include winning Andree who a closing title tells us married him starred in many films (as Catherine Hessling) and after their split died alone in poverty. The sins of the father don't just visit the son but move in with him.
The tension between the painter's idealized flesh and the its horrific reality are frequently imaged especially in the eating scenes and in the kitchen where a maid delicately peels a tomato removing a hide to expose a succulent flesh. The hanging carrion are an implicit reminder of the hunting and killing of the human prey outside. Renoir pere screams from the nightmares he doesn't have his sunshine models and pink paints to ward off.
Around the story of Renoir pere beats a more subtle story of Renoir fils. Like Andree the film serves both father and son. Unobtrusively Bourdos weaves in the specific sources of Renoir's cinema. These include his sense that wars shatter natural crossborder fraternities the harshness of the class prejudices the increasing disrespect for culture the necessity for art. Even the quintessential understanding which will become "The terrible thing is everyone has his reasons." For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.