ON THE FACE OF IT, IT WAS QUITE A SHOCK AT THE 2009 CESAR AWARDS (THE FRENCH OSCARS) WHEN THE LIKES OF THE CLASS, I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG, MESRINE AND A CHRISTMAS TALE ALL LOST OUT ON THE BEST FILM GONG TO SERAPHINE, A RANK OUTSIDER IN SUCH MUCH-LAUDED COMPANY.

Martin Provost’s utterly beguiling film about Seraphine de Senlis, a humble cleaning lady with the artistic gifts of a Van Gogh, fully deserved the honour however. It’s certainly an extraordinary true story, since Seraphine’s canvasses now hang in French museums, a far cry from the reception accorded her before and after WWI, when her dabbling with paint was viewed as just another eccentricity of a half-mad domestic. Her good fortune was that a German art critic, famed for promoting the work of ‘primitive modernists’, including Rousseau, just happened to be staying in a nearby château. Yet the art world’s discovery of this visionary outsider was to prove a rocky experience for everyone involved.

Anchored by Yolande Moreau’s brilliantly convincing central performance, this is a film which sidesteps the usual cliches of biopics about artists by resolutely refusing to make a meal out of the material, instead approaching it with the sort of achingly transcendent simplicity a Robert Bresson or even a Maurice Pialat might have admired. While Seraphine’s story throws up issues of class tension and proprietorial connoisseurship, its essence is to capture the epiphanic outpouring by which this deeply spiritual, quite uneducated woman came to deliver her vision of God-given nature through the medium of paint. This is a genuinely intriguing tale of the limitless mystery of human possibility. — Trevor Johnston.