Renoir (***)

Not a biopic of Pierre Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), this is more like a family portrait set in the great impressionist’s late career. Like a painting, the film is still but nice to look at. It helps that Renoir lived on the French Riviera in a large home with a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. (The director, Gilles Bourdos, also lets the camera fall out of focus a few times, making the screen look something like an impressionist canvas.) In contrast to a movie such as The Last Station, which similarly follows Renoir’s contemporary Leo Tolstoy in his senescence, it is a movie of temperaments rather than beliefs. Where a Tolstoy evolved to the end and lived a personal life of some turmoil, Renoir liked to think of himself as a craftsman who liked to “go with the flow” and favored calmness. Though crippled by painful arthritis, he carries on as before, carried around on a chair by his female staff and working with the brush taped to his misshapen hand. Asked by his doctor what he’ll do if he cannot use his hand, he says, “I’ll paint with my dick.”

Red-headed Christa Theret plays Andrée Heuschling, Renoir’s last model, though Bourdos has set the story in 1915, a couple of years before she actually posed for for the old man. This allows him to set her arrival in the midst of the first World War and proximate to both the recent death of Renoir’s wife and the arrival of his son Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who is convalescing after an injury. Another son, though also injured, is still on the front, and the third, too young to fight, is still at home.

It probably helps to know that Jean, the middle son, would become celebrated in his own right, though not for painting. Here he has principle but not ambition. Andrée, known as Dedée, inspires and challenges him in the manner of many young women in many movies about many sorts of young men. She brings out old desires but no new changes in the painter himself. Through her, we see his personality and the way he worked and the way the other members of the household regarded him.

Renoir the man was an innovator. Renoir is merely competent. Not a great love story, it is simply a drama centered around the great man, whom even his sons call “Renoir.” Bourdos and Bouquet, who gives a fine performance, give us a man who obviously inspired deep loyalty, but whose family relationships lacked intimacy. (The youngest son calls himself an orphan.)

IMDb link 

viewed 4/24/2013 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/24–25/13