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Seraphine

SERAPHINE (Martin Provost). 121 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (July 17). For venues, times and trailers, see Movies. Rating: NNNN

Martin Provost’s spare biographical drama of the French painter Seraphine de Senlis has found an audience on American screens, so domestic distributor E1 – which sent it straight to video in June – has booked it into a digital engagement at the AMC. Everyone’s a winner.[rssbreak]

Seraphine views its subject – played with a glassy-eyed, shambling physicality by Yolande Moreau – through her relationship with her benefactor, the German art critic Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur). He discovered her in 1914 when she was working in total obscurity as a house cleaner and laundress, but fled France before he could bring her to the attention of the world. (They reconnected in 1927.)

Movies about tortured artists are a dime a dozen, but Provost takes pains to avoid sensationalizing Seraphine’s questionable mental state – she believed a guardian angel was her muse – and instead creates a restrained, almost austere portrait of a woman grappling with a creative force she doesn’t fully understand.

And Moreau’s performance suggests that decades of menial labour could well have eroded Seraphine’s mind long before the angels ever showed up.

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