Product Details

• Actors: Ulrich Tukur
• Directors: Martin Provost
• Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: French
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Music Box Films
• DVD Release Date: March 23, 2010
• Run Time: 125 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0031REQKE
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,578 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Séraphine is an elegantly fictionalized biopic about 19th century modern primitive painter, Séraphine de Senlis, who was a contemporary of Henri Rousseau's. The tale spans approximately 25 years during which Séraphine and her champion, German art critic and collector, Wilhelm Uhde, survive two wars and drastic economic changes that affect the art market. Martin Provost's feature is completely character driven, and as such relies on Yolande Moreau's caring portrayal of the eccentric Séraphine, and Ulrich Tukur's calm, academic demeanor as Mr. Uhde. In Provost's telling of this virtually unknown story, Séraphine is a middle-aged woman working as a housekeeper in Senlis, France, when Uhde arrives as a guest and discovers that this odd woman is a talented visionary artist. Since Uhde's main focus is garnering respect and precious Parisian salon space for artists deemed "naive," it is an uncanny and fortuitous coincidence that he stumbles upon Séraphine. Scenes alternate primarily between those encounters between Séraphine and her new friend, and those depicting Séraphine's thought processes or unique working methods. Some of the most beauteous sequences unfold as Séraphine hunts pastoral stream banks for wild plants and soil samples she uses for paint pigment in her floral landscapes. This artist's religious upbringing clearly influences her piously austere lifestyle, and the film implies that the mania plaguing her is exacerbated by delusions of saintliness. Indeed, the film does a wonderful job of showing the subtleties of Séraphine's mental illness in both positive and negative lights. It also elucidates the tragic political circumstances that prevented Séraphine from becoming as renowned as Rousseau, which doubles the story's sense of improbability and chance meeting. The film, on one level, revivifies a spectacular tale to rescue an artist from obscurity. More importantly, though, it poetically questions the amount of luck involved in survival by asking how much control one ultimately has over one's own life. --Trinie Dalton

Product Description

SERAPHINE centers on Séraphine de Senlis (Yolande Moreau), a simple housekeeper whose brilliantly colorful canvases adorn some of the most famous galleries in the world. Wilhelm Uhde, a German art critic and collector (Ulrich Ukur) discovers her paintings while she is working for him as a maid in Senlis near Paris in the early part of the 20th century. Martin Provost s fictionalized and tragic portrait of this forgotten painter is a testament to creativity and the resilience of one woman s spirit. In 1913, the German collector Wilhelm Uhde, the first Picasso buyer and discoverer of acclaimed naïve primitive painter Le Douanier Rousseau, rents an apartment in Senlis in order to write and take a break from his Parisian life. He hires a cleaning lady, Séraphine, 48 years old. Some time later, while visiting the home of a prominent local family, he notices a small painting on wood. His surprise is great when he finds out that it is by none other than Séraphine. A poignant and unexpected relationship then develops between the avant-garde art dealer and the visionary cleaning lady.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seraphine, October 26, 2009

By 

Frank A. Phillips "Projectionist" (Burton, MI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seraphine (DVD)

A sad tale of the life of this wondrous artiste and her descent into mental illness. People around me, in a theatre, were openly crying. The acting was nothing short of Superb and the filming and scenes rare in movies today. Wish I could give it more than the Five stars!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves every award it has won . . ., April 19, 2010

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seraphine (DVD)

Absorbing and beautifully made film with a compelling performance by Yolande Moreau as early 20th-century French painter Seraphine Louis. In addition to the many comments already made here by other appreciative viewers, I would add that the length of the film (2 hours) affords ample opportunity to represent the role of a single, working class woman in France during the period, 1910s-1920s. As a housekeeper and laundrywoman, paid little for her services and regarded typically with disdain by the more moneyed people for whom she works, Seraphine could easily have stepped from the pages of a Victor Hugo novel. The pastoral scenes, the great houses, the cobbled streets, and the costuming represent a world and a social order lingering on from the previous century.

The film makes clear the lot of one born poor and female into such a world. The work required to keep soul and body together is endless, grueling, and mind-numbing. Anyone else would drop from exhaustion at the end of such a day, yet with renewed energy drawn from her angelic forces and a deep love of the woods and fields, Seraphine is somehow able to paint by candlelight at night. While some viewers familiar with her story may find the film slow, what it wants us to care about is the hopelessness of a woman in her social position. Without the kindness of a handful of others and the chance discovery of her artistic gifts by a visiting German art critic and collector, Wilhelm Uhde, she would have disappeared into oblivion and all her breathtakingly inspired paintings with her.

The film also emphasizes her isolation. It underscores this theme with the parallel story of Uhde, who for unexplained reasons has retreated to this rural French town from his life in Germany. There are allusions to his homosexuality (the "blemish" of the film mentioned by another reviewer), but the film suggests that there is a connection here to his taking refuge far from what would be the center of his professional life in Berlin. A story Seraphine reveals of a long-lost love shows the two as similar in their sorrows and losses, each of them alone in the world. This is a lovely, meditative film. Without the narrative force of a Hollywood-style biopic to drive it forward and hold interest, you have to meet it half-way, but accepted on its own terms, it does not disappoint.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The heart in hiding stirred..the acheive of,the mastery of the thing!, June 3, 2010

By 

technoguy "jack" (Rugby) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seraphine (DVD)

Seraphine is a magnificent film of what was to me an unknown French artist,Seraphine Louis,an impoverished cleaner,who was an extraordinary naïve painter.Self-taught,inspired by her religious faith,she had an inner compulsion to express divinely inspired visions through painting,reflections of a psyche walking a tightrope between ecstasy and mental illness.Alongside her arduous day jobs,Seraphine(Yolande Moreau) painted by candlelight,largely in secret isolation,until her considerable body of work was discovered by William Uhde(Ulrich Tukur),German art collector,who was mesmerized.

For most of her life, Séraphine painted in total obscurity, scrimping together enough money from the various types of menial labor on which she subsisted to buy a few art supplies. She mixed these with pigments of her own devising, colors distilled from plant and animal sources familiar to Séraphine from years of tending flocks and other outdoor work. These vibrant colors, which struck Uhde's eye as so unusual, are one of the hallmarks of her work. The subject of almost all of her paintings is the flora of the region where she lived, generally viewed from close up and refracted through the bizarre lens of Séraphine's inner vision. She claimed that heavenly voices directed her to paint, visions that later became delusions strong enough to land her in a mental asylum in Clermont, where she died after a long incarceration. These plants, often dotted and striped like caterpillars or other insects, seem to quiver with life, making them seem more like the fauna of a psychotic landscape.

His support had barely begun to lift her horizons when he was forced to leave France in August 1914; the war between France and Germany had made him an unwelcome outsider in Senlis, much as Séraphine was, given her eccentric persona. They only reestablished contact in 1927 when Uhde - back in France and living in Chantilly - visited an exhibition of local artists in Senlis and, seeing Séraphine's work, realized that she had survived and her art had flourished. Under Uhde's patronage, Séraphine began painting large canvases as large as two meters high, and she achieved prominence as the naïve painter of her day. In 1929, Uhde organized an exhibition,"Painters of the Sacred Heart," that featured Séraphine's art, launching her into a period of financial success she had never known - and was ill prepared to manage. Then, in 1930, with the effects of the Great Depression destroying the finances of her patrons, Uhde had no choice except to stop buying her paintings.

In 1932, Séraphine was admitted for "chronic psychosis" to the psychiatric ward of a geriatric hospital at Clermont, where her artistry found no outlet. Although Uhde reported that she had died in 1934, Séraphine actually lived until 1942 in a hospital annex at Villers-sous-Erquery, where she died friendless and alone[. (Some sources still state she died in 1934.) She was buried in a common grave.Yolande Moreau's performance touches the heart, witness the scene in the special asylum when she touches the chair on the balcony of her room.Ulrich Tukur(Lives of Others) is superb as Uhde. If I have one criticism it's that I thought many of the interior scenes were too darkly lit,although this enhances realism,I couldn't see the paintings with enough clarity.A winner of 7 French Academy awards,with best actress and best picture.