Review of the film “The Nude Muse of Pierre Bonnard”

Martin Provost’s film “The Nude Muse of Pierre Bonnard” (Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe), a biopic of the wonderful post-impressionist painter, member of the Nabis group Pierre Bonnard, is being released. Mikhail Trofimenkov, as a former art critic and specialist in French painting, I did not guess the meaning of the pseudo-tragic vaudeville that participated in the out-of-competition program of the Cannes Film Festival.

Dear Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) did not cut off his ear or shoot himself in the heart, like Vincent Van Gogh. He didn’t fornicate in Tahiti with underage native girls, like Paul Gauguin. He was not a dwarf and a frequenter of brothels, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Didn’t get mixed up with anarchist bombers, like Paul Signac. He did not abuse hashish at the Rotunda cafe and did not pay for absinthe with sketches on napkins, like Amedeo Modigliani.

Bonnard (Vincent Macaigne) was simply a magnificent painter without an outstanding biography. His biography was his work, but, alas, there was no dramatic intrigue in his life that would justify a biopic.

A short-sighted man with an eternally guilty and surprised look. Melancholic and, at times, cheerful. A failed lawyer who looks like a school teacher or an accountant. Quite a Parisian bourgeois, like his wonderful comrades in the Nabis group Edouard Vuillard or Felix Vallotton. Even the hurricanes of the world wars, briefly mentioned in the film, bypassed him. He sat them out in his country houses in Normandy and the Cote d’Azur. Except that in 1942 he refused to paint a portrait of the leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime, Marshal Pétain. And even then only because he demanded that the customer personally pose.

So why was he, so tender and reverent, crucified with an unbearable two-hour biopic? Probably only because pathetic films have already been made and remade about all these “damned artists”, Van Goghs and Gauguins, Modiglianis and Toulouse-Lautrecs. Now, that means, we’ve taken on the “nerds” of painting.

For domestic viewers, Martin Provost’s film from the very first scene will seem like an adaptation of, to put it mildly, piquant anecdotes. So, having put his model, muse and future wife of half a century Martha (Cecile de France) to bed, Bonnard will mistake her asthma attack for an outstanding orgasm. And the timid attempt to build a menage a trois with Martha and young Renee (Stacy Martin) will remind one of the most vulgar jokes on the theme of French frivolity in the genre “Come in, Pierre, the three of us will have more fun.”

But even Martha’s exclamation “Come on, Pierre!” – a masterpiece of the art of dialogue compared to how the characters generally express themselves. “Together we will make a breakthrough in modern painting!” – says Bonnard. “I am nothing more than a naive student who brought back the fire to the extinguished fire of your passion,” Renee challenges Martha. “Caravaggio was not afraid of his dark side,” Bonnard exclaims to Rene during their Roman vacation.

One can only sympathize with the actors doomed to such lines. Even in the old, old biopics like 19 Montparnasse or Moulin Rouge, the on-screen Modigliani and Toulouse-Lautrec spoke more or less humanly.

But Martin Provost brings to the screen not characters from the late 19th century, but clowns in boater hats and dyed red beards. The crying clown Vuillard, the clown fixated on varieties of water lilies Claude Monet, an arrogant clown, in life – a wonderful collector, critic and publisher Tade Nathanson.

But they are just a hysterical choir accompanying the soloists of varying degrees of bitchiness. Martha is a natural witch who has invented both an aristocratic pedigree and a tender age for herself. Plaguing Bonnard with fits of justified or not entirely justified jealousy – if he had been Gauguin, he would have strangled him, but he endured this for half a century. But the craziest thing on screen is pianist Misia Nathanson (Anouk Greenber), who shows up to visit the Bonnards with a second-hand Turkish gigolo, mustachioed like a cockroach.

The only thing that seems more vulgar than Misia’s duet with the Levantine is the material environment itself, the very atmosphere of the film, for which critics almost unanimously praised it at the Cannes premiere. Everything there on the banks of the Seine is green and green. Umbrellas, boaters, hats, ponds with water lilies. And naked, naked painters with their muses run and splash around all this splendor. And sometimes the rival muses themselves run into the ponds right in their dresses and begin their pathetic dialogues right there.

I just want boatmen from impressionist paintings to sail past them and accidentally hit them with an oar, so that they don’t vulgarize a great era.