Séraphine (2009)

This movie is about a woman who existed. She is known as Séraphine de Senlis, who was born Séraphine Louis and took the name of her hometown as an artist. She is working as a char woman in local middle gentry homes, when her exquisite and unusual still lifes are discovered. She has the good luck to work for Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German collector and art critic who is rusticating in Senlis and struggling with being accused of being a homosexual (he alludes to that being correct but unacceptable for his role in society). Uhde, an early patron of Picasso and Braque, was also famous for having discovered and popularized the work of Rousseau, a Belgian customs officer whose vibrant and exotic paintings seemed to come from nowhere and find their way to the very center of modern consciousness. Séraphine strikes Uhde as a similar kind of artist: self-taught, working in isolation and producing work that seems uncannily out of this world and ahead of its time. He is her savior, at least temporarily--she ends up being institutionalized at the end of her life, and in some ways, taking her away from her daily cleaning routines seems to set her off her game.

One thing that intrigued me about the portrayal of Séraphine in this film is that while she is known to have died in a sanitarium, there are a lot of reasons for going there in the first half of the twentieth century. The movie describes her as more obsessive compulsive than psychotic. She has rituals and habits that must be adhered to. She does have some fixed ideas, but again, they seem more like what is typical of OCD rather than psychotic illness. The film made me want to know more about the person, and that is a fine film indeed.