Seraphine
Details
# Seraphine
Original title: Séraphine
In 1912 German collector Wilhelm Uhde rents a flat in Senlis to write and take a break from Parisian life. He hires a 48-year old cleaning lady, Séraphine. Some time later, he notices a small painting on wood at a local notable home.
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Ty Burr
"Séraphine" (streaming on Kanopy – really – Hoopla; for rent on Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Prime Video), may be one of the spookiest, most unsettling films ever made about the hazy line between art and madness.
That's a theme the movies have done to death, but it finds new life in the title performance by Yolande Moreau, a shapeless, middle-aged actress who embodies the creative urge with an intensity half animal and half divine. Earlier this year, Moreau won one of the film's seven Cesar awards – France's version of the Oscars – yet there's nothing actressy about what she does here. She seems to have wandered in from talking to gods in the fields.
**Roger Ebert -**June 17, 2009
In this miraculous film we learn nothing of her low birth or early life; we only see her daily toil and nightly ecstasy.
“Seraphine” arrives from France as the year’s most honored film, winner of seven Cesars from the French Academy, including best film and best actress. The actress is Yolande Moreau, who combines, as some people do, a plain face with moments of beauty. Notice her fleeting little smile of complicity as she steals fuel from candles before the Virgin.
## Dennis Schwartz
The film’s noble purpose is to point out that there’s no one path for an artist, that no matter how discouraging it may be the true artist has no choice but to follow his/her heart. This odd relationship between the business savvy talented art scout/avant-garde art dealer and the visionary peasant artist given to lapses of madness, gives testimony to the human spirit and the mysteries of creativity.