Four out of ten stars, a near average score for an average movie. It's perfectly watchable, but as cardboard cutout flat as most biopics, full of the kind of supposedly key material events that are meant to turn something as amorphous and strange as a life into a story. Short, bureaucratically efficient dialogues ensure all this fits a standard running time, never digressive or very psychological and never distinguished by visual flair or intelligence. This is all normal.
But I've subtracted a star from what would have been a straight middling score - and kind of feel like taking off more - for giving such a standard workmanlike treatment to this particular material. Who sets a film in the Belle Époque and makes it so relentlessly un-belle?
Some of the open goals are like abysses. A character refers to the art nouveau pieces in her own flat, which she is standing in, yet we barely see them. We get a tiny nod to the tendency in the jewelled tortoise, lifted from Huysman's novel of the period, À Rebours, at a society soirée, but though the animal is important to the protagonist (she says it's the only thing she liked at the party) it seems not to be to the director, who barely bothers with it. We hear later from Colette that the other guests were decadent phonies, locked into extravagant self-promoting personae - just the types an art nouveau artist like Beardsley or a post-impressionist like Lautrec would have gone to town with - but there is no showing, only telling. At the time the guests seemed perfectly normal.
It's the era of new technologies like street lighting, electric light in homes, which gets a brief mention, and, of course, still photography and cinema - all of which also might have informed the look of the thing, if only to make the dark tones darker and give the image a grain. Instead the film looks professionally lit in the worst way, low contrast and colouristically anaemic.
What's the point of a film about an artist with so little artistry to it? What's the good of giving such a dry stick of a thing to audiences who presumably went in because they were interested in art?
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