“The Bonnards” in the cinema – light without any shadow?

This director has already proven several times that he can tell unusual stories based on apparent minorities, closely observed details. With “Séraphine” Martin Provost achieved a completely unusual film about the art collector Wilhelm Uhde, which Ulrich Tukur played with great intensity. Coming to Paris, he notices at some point: his cleaning lady paints and that in an unprecedented way! An outsider of the art business – similar to the Zöllner Rousseau with his naive pictures? Unfortunately, the story about Séraphine is not going well. Uhde promotes them at first, but then the First World War comes and he loses her eyes, finally finds it again, she still paints and he supports her with purchases. But the sudden success completely messes up the life of the simple woman. Her behavior becomes more and more striking and finally she ends up in the closed psychiatry, where she stays up to her death. It remains unclear whether she actually went crazy or just seemed too eccentric on her surroundings.

Unfortunately, Provost has now tried to tell the same story again with the painter Pierre Bonnard and his partner Marthe. Marthe is his more random model at first, but they stay together, after 30 years they get married. Bonnard paints her again and again for 50 years, she can be seen on 374 pictures, on 341 as an act. Was she his muse, remained the obsession for the woman with the androgynous charisma or was it even due to the patient’s economy that he painted Marthe so often? All of this seems unclear. We often see Pierre and Marthe run naked in nature, they obviously have the mentality in the past, but basically they remain strange to us. This certainly also results from the fact that Marthe made a secret around himself and her origin, even she did not reveal her name. Above all, she was jealous. Bonnard’s pictures that showed other women destroyed them by hand. This could be the dramatic spark for a chamber game by painter and model, but it becomes too rare.

Although the Guillaume Schiffman camera succeeds in creating a very own atmospheric visual language, it takes almost two hours until it becomes clear what the director tries here: to translate the aesthetics of Bonnard’s painting into a film about him. However, this only works in phases, also because the special features of this aesthetics have never really been worked out. So you have plenty of opportunity to annoy yourself about the infantile German rental title “The Bonnards – Painting and Love” – ​​in French the film is simply called “Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe”.

Such stories about painters and their models are popular, also Auguste Rodin, legend, an erotic female feast, had a touching relationship with his model Rose that was neither beautiful nor clever nor friendly being – and yet she connected something that we do not know about what. In 2017, Jacques DOILLON “Auguste Rodin” with Vincent Lindon as the main actor. But this important film was more than the story of an erotic entanglement, devoted itself to the emergence of such famous works of art as “The Denker” or “Balzac”.

The idea of ​​the film: A painter and his model inhabit the world of pictures that Bonnard has created for decades.

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Strangely, this does not take place here. The special aesthetics of the pictures of Bonnard, which not everyone knows and which you should first imagine as a painter, remains as a topic on the left. Also acts as hesitantly as Bonnard that he looks like a corner of the corner in his own film. Cécile de France as a Marthe is stronger in terms of expression, but we still learn almost nothing about you, except that it is jealous about the dimensions and initially suffers from many health restrictions (asthma, weak heart). The doctor says to Bonnard that she would die early. The topic is not taken up again, and 50 years later she still lives, but is mentally confused, so Bonnard has to maintain her.

There is an episode in her life that shows: it begins to paint, and that in a very independent way. At that time, Bonnard lives with another model, and Stacy Martin, known from Lars von Trier’s »Nymphomaniac«, gives the film to the film that had been rapidly rippling until then. But then she takes her life and the film falls back into its old tranquility, which came from boredom.

The idea of ​​the film: a painter and his model inhabit over decades (Bonnard died in 1947, Marthe five years before him) the world of pictures that Bonnard created. That could have been terrific, but it hardly works. Because everyone involved was only motivated below average? Perhaps it is also because we don’t get to know Bonnard’s painting too little in this film.

It seems to me that Martin Provost misses something crucial: Bonnard is not a mere late impressionist. Rather, he tries to translate the symbolism of the poetry of Mallarmé into his own visual language. His pictures always seem amazingly bright (he lived above Cannes on the Côte d’Azur), but he does not paint the moment in nature, but tries to show the “ideal moment”, like his fatherly friend Monet, often works for months to prepare it. Famous paintings such as “White Interior” are sophisticated experimental arrangements that preceded hundreds of sketches. This is missing in Martin Provost’s annoyance to the strange painter Bonnard, who did not paint the light, but tried to express the idea of ​​light. He worked without a easel for his life and rejected every frame for his canvases, which in roles in his studio. He refused to limit any kind of conventional limitation.

Bonnard produced a sequence of color spots, which he then connected in a second step to find the time afterwards. His famous painting “Atelier with Mimosen” therefore consists almost only of yellow color, large and small dots, the composition of which follows Marcel Proust’s claim “looking for the lost time”. Successfully? That would have been a question that could have gave its specific weight to this too much-indulgent film.

What is the life price that the art demands from the artist? The painter called it the viewer’s submission to the picture. Provost with his Bonnard film is far from such an impact.

“The Bonnards – Painting and Love”, Belgium, France 2023. Directed by and Book: Martin Provost. With: Cécile de France, Vincent Macaigne, Stacy Martin. 123 min. Now in the cinema.