Seraphine – 3

I had never heard of the “naïve” artist Seraphine de Senlis, but discovering at movie’s end that she was a real person explained in large part why this film was so dramatically inert. To take but one example, Wilhelm Uhde had to flee Senlis at the outset of World War I because that actually happened, not because it moved the plot in any particular direction. The lead role was undoubtedly well acted, but that didn’t make her enjoyable to watch – and why was there a nude scene? Just to show that the film was French (or Belgian)? Uhde himself was extremely boring, and the use of name-dropping (Picasso, Rousseau) to attach importance to what we were witnessing was off-putting instead. Everything the director tried was overly obvious, and none of it worked.