By -

If one’s to judge from the title, Martin Provost’s Bonnard, Pierre & Marthe is a balanced account of the life of French painter Pierre Bonnard, and his also-painter wife Marthe (nee Maria Boursin). The power couple of French post-impressionism, who traded the bohemian lifestyle of Paris for the solitude reclusion of the countryside.

Their story is rich and complex. Him, a post-impressionist painter who survived his years of excess in Paris with the help of a rich benefactor, her the complete personification of a muse – beautiful and mysterious, said to be related to a noble Italian family that fell from grace, when in reality she came from a humble working class background. For decades they had their relationship scrutinised and misunderstood. Marthe, like many women, was portrayed as possessive and jealous who removed Pierre from the milieu where he thrived artistically. Both an inspiration and executioner.

But the truth is so much more interesting. Pierre was not the troubled and free-spirited artists who swoon every woman he met, and Marthe wasn’t the artistic succubus whose life was defined by her relationship with Pierre. They had skeletons in the closed, and distinctive tempestuous personalities where the clash was so thunderous it spear-headed a new artistic movement in France. Their story is dense, with hidden twists and complicated assumptions.

But you wouldn’t know from this film. From all the title promises, Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe is only about Marthe as she relates to Pierre. And Pierre and how he relates to himself.

From the moment Pierre Bonnard (Vincent Macaigne) meets Marthe de Méligny (Cécile de France), we are given the most dull account of these people’s stories. Provost finds no interest in the mystery of their relationship and reduces their actions to the lowest common denominator of soap operas. Marthe is jealous of Misia, she’s jealous of Pierre’s artist friends, she’s jealous of his students who pose for him, and from her jealousy comes unreasonable rage and desperation. Pierre is a free-spirited artist who devotes his life to his partner and his art, the two are seen as not mutually exclusive. He is a victim of his sensibility, she feeds on that devotion.

The result is a film out of touch and out of tune. Every woman is defined by their obsession to Pierre. They all want to be with him, and when they’re not, oh how they suffer. Marthe feels his absence so strongly she stops bathing and starts painting. Misia goes mad clinging to a depressing nostalgia she never evolved from. And Bonnard’s other love interest, Renée Monchaty (Stacy Martin), commits suicide over grief. There is no intention in developing any of these characters beyond the purpose to a man’s life. I suspect Provost, who also co-wrote the script with his writing partner Marc Abdelnour, never talked to another woman about anything else but himself.

It is such a missed opportunity. France gives her best to imbue in Marthe a higher sense of personality, but she’s constantly constrained by having to act according to the narrative of what she represented to Pierre. You understand why Pierre sees her as a muse and it goes beyond beauty standards. It’s about seeing past the surface of a person, into their purest core. France embodies that with intensity. The film doesn’t match her grandeur.

Provost is a good director. His style is very subdued but effective. But here he falls on the easiest trap an artist could make. Redundant, not interesting, but ultimately pretty.
Curiously there was another French period film about a relationship between an artist and his muse – Anh Hung Tran’s The Taste of Things. In it Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel complement each other and their art (cooking, in this case). It’s a film about devotion, love and respect. It understands how each character is their own individual, and it’s in the tension where they both meet that their work is elevated. It’s a vastly superior film because it respects both its protagonists and, by the extension, its audience.

Verdict: 2 out of 5
For fans of French period dramas. It has all the elements of the genre, lurid and serious, yet fans of both Pierre and Marthe Bonnard won’t get the depth of their story.