“Ritratto di un amore”: a movie about film Pierre and Marthe Bonnard

Telling the life of the painter and his muse - wife, it is a film as delicate as it is intense in its almost atomic attitude to breaking down happiness into increasingly smaller elements until it reaches the essence, then turn it into its opposite, unhappiness. Sadness, melancholy, frustration.

And then again, the joy, the harmony and that tireless game that only two lovers can play, over time.

A biopic? The term is too narrow, rather it could be defined as a small anatomical treatise on the uniqueness of a love relationship. The film is directed by Martin Provost who, with the title Portrait of a Love (I Wonder Pictures), lets the mystery that is the couple speak.

Watch the trailer for Portrait of a Love Story

The almond tree episode happens in Le Cannet, a small town in the south of France, where the couple had moved when they were elderly. But it all begins much earlier, in Paris in Bonnard's atelier, where she posed for him.

It's the first time, she doesn't even know what her name is, he hired her on the street, but in an instant passion overwhelms them. The game begins and will never stop, in an unbalanced balancing act that will lead everyone to wonder who is vampirizing who.

She is the fetish, the absolute muse, for many guilty of having isolated him from the world, for others instead the victim of her husband, a brilliant predator. Both things are probably real, they are certainly two kindred souls, perfect for becoming companions in life and art.

Vincent Macaigne and Cécile De France, in the roles of Pierre and Marthe respectively, tell the story ofParis at the end of the 19th century and that group of artists who called themselves Nabis, post-impressionists friends of Degas, Renoir and Monet, and their worldly life.

Marthe hates fictions, even if she lives in the lie of a character she invented to hide her true identity, that of Maria Boursin.

And this world of sincerity and mythomania makes her allergic to the game of sociality, that constructed theater from which she escapes, taking Pierre with her into the universe of love for solitude and nature.

This is how they move to the Roulotte, a country house on the Seine, magnificently described by the set designer Jérémie Duchier (Cesar Award /strong> for the film Chocolat) which showcases its flavor, style, but above all the light, which the director of photography Guillaume Schiffman (award Cesarand an Oscar nomination for The Artist) creates a dialogue with Bonnard's paintings.

The Caravan becomes an emblem of a way of life and in Duchier's hands it becomes a precise reference of style, more or less in contrast with the elegant houses of the city's high society, until it reaches its opposite in Rome.