Séraphine

The film tells the true story of Séraphine Louis (1864 - 1942), also known as Séraphine of Senlis, an untutored country washerwoman who painted ecstatic, almost hallucinatory still lifes of flowers and fruits. Discovered in 1914 by the German art critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), her work was initially lumped in with the “naïve art’’ of Henri Rousseau and other painters, but today she’d be more correctly labeled - and celebrated - as an “outsider artist.’’ Whatever you call her, there was no place in pre-WWI Europe for Séraphine’s art and barely any place for her as a person.

Director Martin Provost keeps the paintings from us for a good half-hour, following Séraphine as she stumps around her small village, washing linens, cleaning houses, helping out shopkeepers for the stray sou. She’s the village idiot, for all intents and purposes, regularly climbing trees and ducking nude into the river to commune with spirits she alone hears. Uhde, renting a country house in Senlis to write his articles on Picasso in peace, looks at this large, ungainly woman scrubbing his floors and sees what everyone else in town sees: a piece of furniture, human livestock. The beauty is all inside her.

Almost by accident, the collector comes across one of her small artworks, painted on wood using oils Séraphine herself makes in secret. He pays her, praises her, urges her to keep at it, and this is incomprehensible to the woman, someone acknowledging what she sees and asking for more. Uhde, though, is an inconstant patron: as a German in 1914 France and as a properly closeted gay man, he is incapable of throwing caution to the wind.

This first part of “Séraphine’’ is filmed like a standard period piece, albeit with special attention to the wind in the trees. Provost, who wrote the script with Marc Abdelnour, presents Séraphine Louis as a misfit mystic on a par with William Blake and Vincent Van Gogh, but based on what we see in those prewar paintings, the analogy doesn’t quite hold.