The painter has a long eye and notices the girl on the street. He approaches her, convinces her to pose. The door in the dormer in Montmartre and begins to draw furiously, without ever turning around. He asks her to uncover her breasts. She is shy. He colours, erases, shades. Then the girl threatens to leave, what was supposed to happen didn’t happen. The painter stops her and tries to kiss her. She slaps him. A moment later, the painter and the model are two bodies under the sheets although both are unaware of the other’s name. Can you imagine something more romantic and bohemian?
The iron passion for Marthe de Méligny of the post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), the most “Japanese” of the Nabis revolutionaries, it is described in books, it was emphasized by gossipers and slanderers, it ended up in his most famous paintings and in her melancholy, especially when the couple became a triangle with the entry of the Pre-Raphaelite muse Renée (Stacy Martin). Marthe de Méligny (Cécile de France) was a girl from the common people, marked by asthma, employed by a flower company. In reality, the blonde lady was called Maria Boursin and she hid a very miserable existence in mystery, passing herself off as an aristocrat of Italian origins. Pierre (Vincent Macaigne) was instead a young artist from a bourgeois family, with a disheveled quiff and glasses on his nose, entertainer of living rooms, fiery lover, attentive to the colors of life, friend of Degas, Monet, Renoir and JE Vuillard.
The two loved each other for fifty years, in Paris between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, isolating themselves in the nature of their cabin on the Seine, at the gates of the Ville Lumiére, while Pierre increased his fame and riches by creating most of the two hundred works that make up his production. Together, they faced curves, turns, slips: they lost each other, they understood each other, they gave each other love.
Martin Provost, 67 years old, director of La Belle épouse, Séraphine, Violettetries to explain to us that existence, if well assisted, can be an almost-masterpiece and tells the relationship between Pierre and Marthe with lightness, even in the most tragic passages, softening the clichés or the less intense moments of the story. His is a “dad’s cinema”, entirely explicit, which relies on period and environmental portraits to delve into the psychologies of the three key characters. Dreamy and powerful love can kill its interpreters, Provost underlines, suffocating them in an irresistible disturbance. Love transforms (and deforms): Marthe forgives Pierre’s betrayals, enters the relationship with Renée with caution and wisdomeven when he decides to marry her, in Rome, and leaves his wife to her sentimental yearnings and artistic talents. Perfect representation of the cynical Belle Époque of fantasy, of lake idylls, of betrayals and palettes, of bold letters and blushes on the cheeks. The best phrase in the film? When Marthe, on her deathbed at Le Cannet, expresses her final love for her: «Bury me, Pierre».
PORTRAIT OF A LOVE by Martin Provost
(France, 2023, duration 122′, I Wonder Pictures)
with Cécile de France, Vincent Macaigne, Stacy Martin, Anouk Grinberg, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
Rating: 3 ½ out of 5
In the rooms
