Renoir (2012)

RENOIR  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Gilles Bourdos
    Michel Bouquet, Christa Theret, Vincent Rottiers,
    Thomas Doret, Romane Bohringer, Michèle Gleizer
The thing you notice about this movie, from the beginning, is the light. It's perfect. Maybe this light only exists in the South of France. I don't know. It's 1915. The painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir is still at work, old and arthritic, attended to by a household of doting women, a brush strapped to his painfully crippled right hand. The painter's son Jean, the future filmmaker, is home on leave from the war, recovering from a leg wound. Into their world, riding a bicycle and wrapped in russet colors that match her hair, comes Andrée Heuschling, the temperamental, free-spirited beauty who would become a muse to both men, first as the painter's model, and later as the filmmaker's wife and cinematic collaborator. As men and artists, Auguste and Jean are at opposite ends of their lives. Auguste works quickly, driven to finish his work, more concerned with color than with line. His obsession is with skin, and one look at Andrée's undraped form makes it clear that the old man knows what he's talking about. Jean, meanwhile, doesn't even know what he wants to do yet. He's years away from making his first movie, but already he's collecting reels of film and screening them on what he calls a "contraption," a World-War-One-era projector. His moves toward Andrée, like his moves toward his art, are tentative. As a muse, Andrée seems, not dull, really, but a little superficial. She's pouty and hedonistic, flirting and backing away, but beyond her obvious physical charms, it's hard to see why Jean would put up with her, which he would, for the next 15 years. But then there's the way the sun streams in through a window, and the wind plays over the water and through the trees. A bit of white fabric slipping down off a model's shoulder. The brushstrokes on canvas. The light and the color. The contours and texture of skin. To the eye of an artist, especially an old one racing the clock, maybe that's everything. Maybe it's enough.