Director Martin Provost is known for his biopics of French women, both real and (semi-)fictional, and his latest extends the idea by studying the artistic evolution of Marthe de Meligny (Cécile de France), a factory worker who, by chance, meets the budding impressionist painter, Pierre Bonnard, on a Paris street in 1893 and quickly becomes his model, despite having no overt inclination for art or posing. The nudity he insists on, in fact, bothers her at first, but since the couple is having sex before the day is through, you assume she’s not as prudish as she claims. Either that, or Provost is simply exercising his prerogative as a French director to make everything about sex. The ensuing story takes the couple through the rest of their lives, and, despite Pierre’s self-justifying tendency to stray, Provost and his two actors are convincing with regard to the Bonnards’ enduring love, though the director endeavors to cast this love as a function of the pair’s artistic ambitions. Eventually, Marthe, too, becomes a painter, and rather than react with competitive resentment, Pierre encourages her to the extent that he takes on the household chores around their sloppy but large, airy, rural house so that she can concentrate on her art more diligently. Though refreshing in what it says about their relationship, for Pierre, assuming domestic responsibilities has more to do with throwing off bourgeois trappings—at first, he forbids Marthe from getting pregnant—and embracing the modernism he so slavishly admires around him. 

Though there’s not much of a plot on which to hang the movie, Provost contrasts the pleasures of the epicurean oasis Pierre has created with the hypocrisies of male-oriented bohemianism in such a way that you can follow the road that modernism followed in the first half of the 20th century. There’s a lot of naked frolicking and weighty discussions about art and social constructs that imply you had to be there to fully appreciate the epistemological significance. And while Marthe’s chronic infirmities are used to add drama to sequences where there otherwise wouldn’t be any, she remains the strongest character in a film that includes such contemporary luminaries as Claude Monet (Andre Marcon) and Édouard Vuilliard (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), thus suggesting that without participants grounded in the reality of day-to-day life, modernism would have died of starvation early on. 

Consequently, it takes a crisis of love to really push Marthe toward her full potential as an artist, and Provost makes a good case that she was the superior painter because of it. I’ll take his word for it because I knew nothing about the Bonnards before I saw his movie, and while your enjoyment of it will greatly depend on your capacity for melodramatic overkill in the service of sex and art, I will admit the movie has historical value. That assumes, however, Provost is being honest and not just exploitative.

In French. Opens Sept. 20 in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Les Films du Kiosque-France 3 Cinema-Umedia-Volapuk