Speculative, segmentary biography — twenty years in scope — of an obscure figure from 20th-century art history, Séraphine Louis, dite Séraphine de Senlis, a pious provincial housecleaner by day, and by night a compulsive self-taught painter (under past orders from her guardian angel at the convent), whose secret talent is discovered just before the First World War by one of her cleaning customers, a homosexual German art dealer and critic (discoverer earlier of Henri Rousseau) on sojourn in northern France, a prissy connoisseur preferring the label of Modern Primitives to the veiled insult of Naives. Well structured, well proportioned, well (if slowly) paced, the film carries out a dispassionate examination of hidden inner worth, long ignored, thrillingly recognized, hazardously overinflated, and — it’s not an Andersen fairy tale — ultimately, tormentingly unrewarded. Anyone can relate. Both of the main characters, the painter and her patron, are complicated people, treated with respect but not reverence, tact but not timidity, by filmmaker Martin Provost, and played for full complication and consequent inconsistency and ambiguity by Yolande Moreau and Ulrich Tukur. The former, primarily a stage actress, and on screen a supporting actress, never raises the least suspicion that she is acting, only the total belief in her being. She is Séraphine, and Séraphine is she. Nor, in the larger picture, is there the tiniest pinprick in the tangible illusion of the place and period, the sights, the sounds, the surfaces, the objects, observed with a near scientific exactitude. The film picks you up, sets you down, seals you in. Like magic. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.