Out of Frame: Séraphine and Tokyo Sonata
Ulrich Tukur (Wilhelm Uhde) and Yolande Moreau (Séraphine Louis) in Séraphine
The paintings of Séraphine de Senlis were first championed by the collector Wilhelm Uhde, played with patrician reserve by Ulrich Tukur. When he comes from Paris to Senlis under somewhat murky circumstances in 1914, Uhde is surprised to find his next discovery scrubbing the floors of his rented rooms. We learn a lot about Séraphine's existence, in a moving, witty performance by Yolande Moreau, before we know anything about her painting, which reveals the art as just another part of her unusual life. She scrimps together a living serving as a maid, scrubbing linen in the river, occasionally cooking for nuns in Clermont, where she spent part of her early life after being orphaned. All the while she is collecting odd things — cow's blood, used candle wax, ochre-colored mud, wildflowers — that we later learn serve as special pigments, creating the inimitable colors of her paintings. Unfortunately, Uhde has to flee France suddenly as the battles of World War I approach Senlis, fearing he will be shot as a deserter. When Uhde has returned to France a decade later, he reconnects with Séraphine and helps sell her art, providing income that allows her to focus on painting and, unfortunately, helps lead to the breakdown that ultimately leaves her confined to an asylum for the last decade of her life.
Wisely, Provost has avoided the typical pitfall of the biopic (he shares the writing credit with Marc Abdelnour), by not including a series of cameos by famous personages: there are no actors trying to incarnate Henri Rousseau, Marie Laurencin, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Daniel Kahnweiler, or Gertrude Stein, although all could conceivably be related to the story. This is a film about the life of Séraphine de Senlis, not the history of early modern art. The matter of Séraphine's artistic inspiration, which she claims is divine, is handled with magnanimous sympathy. The only real art to which she was exposed was in church, especially in her work with the nuns at Clermont, and her fervent Catholic faith percolates through the movie. Its visual beauty (cinematography by Laurent Brunet), its attention to historical detail, and above all one of the best performances of Yolande Moreau's career will hopefully put this film into the field for an Academy Award in the foreign film category.
Séraphine opens today at Landmark's Bethesda Row Cinema. Watch the trailer here.
(L to R) Kyôko Koizumi (Megumi Sasaki), Inowaki Kai (Kenji Sasaki), Teruyuki Kagawa (Ryûhei Sasaki), and Yû Koyanagi (Takashi Sasaki) in Tokyo Sonata
Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa sets the mood of Tokyo Sonata almost immediately, with a moody, quasi-Minimalist score (original music by Kazumasa Hashimoto) in the background of the dreary routine of the Sasaki household. The family's putative head, Ryûhei Sasaki, played as a distant, weary Japanese Everyman by Teruyuki Kagawa, loses his position as "Director of Administration," a job that is never explained but does not really need to be. His boss learns that the entire section can be outsourced to China much more cheaply, and within minutes Sasaki is on the street. His shame only worsens the disconnection from his children, a shaggy-haired older son, Takashi (Yû Koyanagi), who appears early in the morning and sleeps all day, and a smart, underachieving younger son, Kenji (Inowaki Kai), whom he forbids to study the piano.
The script (credited to Kurosawa, Max Mannix, and Sachiko Tanaka) is compelling while it focuses on the father, one of countless, dark-suited automatons learning the ins and outs of unemployment in modern Japan. He runs into Kurosu (a charismatic Kanji Tsuda), who teaches him how to stand in lines for food hand-outs and more and more humiliating job leads and interviews, as well as much more important strategies to keep his wife from discovering his secret. The story descends into the absurdly bathetic as it lurches toward its too tidy conclusion, especially as the mother of the family, Megumi, played by Kyôko Koizumi with submissiveness and desperately feigned contentment, unravels. Ironically, she was at her most beautiful at the nadir of this crisis, bathed in dawn light when she seemed to awaken to her self on a beach (cinematography by Akiko Ashizawa).
By the time we get to the real conclusion, Kenji's audition for a music school, the boy's talent and the beauty of his performance of Debussy's Clair de lune (actual playing by Takao Sonosuke, admirable because it is kept free of all affectation) become clear to his parents, their ears and minds having become much more receptive. Although what the family has gone through seems implausible — or outright impossible, like the older son supposedly joining the American military — the lesson learned nevertheless seems sincere. Parenting is mostly accidental, and perhaps, if you are lucky, you will get a second chance: that genuine, if slightly saccharine, sentiment likely contributed to the film receiving the Un Certain Regard jury prize at Cannes last year.
Tokyo Sonata opens today at the E Street Cinema. View the trailer here.