When a woman values her art over personal happiness, the result can yield sheer, mesmerizing beauty. Tolstoy wrote that women prevail because of their "ingrained talent" to achieve happiness, but at the same time this talent becomes their downfall in achieving true greatness. Indeed, had Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt or Marie Laurencin sacrificed a chunk of their art for romance and family or just plain mental tranquillity, would they have been able to give the world what they did?
This is the question that hovers continuously over "Seraphine," an imagined biopic (which often work better than true-to-life stuff) of early-20th-century painter Seraphine Louis, better known as Seraphine de Senlis, after the French province where she spent most of her life.
Directed and cowritten by Martin Provost, "Seraphine" is as enigmatic and perplexing as its title character — a woman whom we first see performing the lowest domestic chores for a few sous in the years just before World War I. Seraphine (played by the always-wonderful Yolande Moreau) at this time is a blowsy, middle-aged drudge whose days are crammed with kitchen chores and washing piles of other people's sheets in the local river.