Renoir (2012)

Directed by: Gilles Bourdos | 113 minutes | drama | Actors: Michel Bouquet, Christa Theret, Vincent Rottiers, Thomas Doret, Michèle Gleizer, Romane Bohringer, Carlo Brandt, Hélène Babu, Stuart Seide, Paul Spera, Cecile Rittweger

‘La grande illusion’ (1937), ‘La règle du jeu’ (1939) – these are just two masterpieces from the illustrious career of filmmaker Jean Renoir. In the biopic ‘Renoir’ (2012) by Gilles Bourdos we see how his later wife Catherine (also known as Andrée) Hessling warms him up to the phenomenon of film. Yet it is not his biopic, but that of his father, the famous painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in the last years of his life. Pierre-Auguste was a contemporary of Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and our own Vincent van Gogh and it is none other than Henri Matisse who sent the young Andrée (Christa Theret) to his colleague Renoir (Michel Bouquet) in 1915; she is a beautiful new model for the Impressionist painter who is in his late nude period. Old Renoir’s wife died not long before and two of his sons are fighting at the front. The fresh and fruity Andrée should cheer up the grumpy patriarch with her youthful beauty. And she succeeds, because she becomes his new muse.

The Renoir family is a special household. The painter is surrounded by many women. Are they housekeepers, old models, ladies with whom he occasionally puts the flowers outside? His youngest son Coco (Thomas Doret) hardly gets any attention; where portraits of the eldest two sons hang on the wall, nothing of him can be found. No wonder the kid is acting a little strange. But Bourdos does nothing with that lead. Much more interesting to him is the relationship between Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who returns to recover from trench warfare seriously injured in a thigh, and his father. Jean, the apple of his father’s eye for many years, falls in love with his new muse and that love turns out to be mutual. Dad, grumpy as he was and suffering from his physical discomfort, is annoyed by this, but he does insist that his son finally has to get his life in order. If he really needs Andrée for that, then so be it.

While Bourdos has done his best to make his film look as picturesque as possible – he’s obviously taken a good look at Renoir’s work – this biopic is rather dull from a narrative point of view. Here and there an opening is made to an interesting storyline, but one always falls back on the rather colorless Renoir senior, who is depicted here as an old old man who can still paint very nicely but shakes cliché after cliché from his inseparable white hat. . The best man does not get depth because of this. Actually, all the characters are only one-dimensional, because Bourdos (who is responsible for the script together with Michel Spinosa and Jérome Tonnerre) could and should have done much more with Andrée and Jean. Because all three have undoubtedly had intriguing personalities, who could have easily held the attention if they had been written and performed in an interesting way. But the actors also don’t really know how to bring their characters to life. ‘Renoir’ may not be sleep-inducing, but Bourdos also fails to impress with this dull biopic.