Tom's Life Bits

March 29, 2013, 2:00 PM ET
By Lanie Goodman

The sensuous new biopic “Renoir” begins in a blaze of color and light. On a warm summer day in 1915, a young flame-haired girl is bicycling down a leafy lane in the south of France. Arriving at Renoir’s country home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, she tramps through the wild roses and silvery green olive grove and enters the artist’s studio, blithely announcing that she’s come to pose for him.

Little does the ailing 74 year-old painter (Michel Bouquet) imagine that this radiant, impetuous teenager, Andrée Heuschling (Christa Theret), will fill him with unexpected vibrant energy and become his final muse. “Her skin soaks up the light,” Renoir enthuses to his entourage.

The idea for “Renoir,” which has earned warm critical praise in France and throughout Europe ever since it opened this January, came to director Gilles Bourdos (“Afterwards”) almost by fluke while wandering through his favorite hangout in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Some people go to psychoanalysts, I go to the Met. It’s my church,” says Bourdos, who was born and raised in Nice and now lives in Brooklyn.

“When I entered the room of Renoirs and Cezannes, I suddenly felt a rush of closeness for the French Mediterranean,” the director says. “At first, I hesitated between the two artists, but also realized how different the subjects would be. Cezanne was afraid of his models—he was a solitary man who shut out the world whereas Renoir had a hot-blooded down-to-earth working class side to him. And an appetite for life.”

“Do you mind if I move around?” asks Dédée, as she was called, at the outset of the film. “If I minded, I’d paint apples,” retorts Auguste. “I need living, breathing material. What interests me is skin, the velvety texture of a young woman’s skin.”

“Most people have a hard time understanding Auguste Renoir’s final period but it’s the one I particularly admire,” Bourdos says.

“In his twilight years, his wife dies, his two sons are in the war, his arthritic hands have to be bandaged to hold a paintbrush, and he’s confined to a wheelchair. But the more Renoir is gripped by those tenebrous forces and racked with pain, the more his paintings explode with colors–flashy candy-colored oranges and reds—that push away the negativity of the world. There are no more decorative motifs, only the heavy bodies of women sprawled in a lush, timeless landscape,” Bourdos continues. “And that’s what I wanted to show in the film—Renoir’s celebration of desire and the beauty of a young woman outweighs his loss, his illness and his constant worrying about his sons.”

Or as Auguste Renoir once put it: “Pain passes, but beauty remains.”

As fate would have it, Jean Renoir, the artist’s filmmaker-to-be son (Vincent Rottiers), is equally seduced by Andrée’s charms. When the twenty-one year-old lieutenant returns home from the war to convalesce after a serious leg injury in combat, he finds himself falling in love with his father’s model. He will later marry Andrée in 1920, after Auguste’s death, promising to use his inheritance money to put her in the movies.

Changing her name to Catherine Hessling, Andrée (who allegedly sang off key and was unremarkable as an actress) would star in five films directed by her husband before they split in 1931. “She felt betrayed when Jean agreed, at his producer’s insistence, to give the star role to another actress in ‘La Chienne’,” says Bourdos.

“I was able to find one interview from 1945, where Andrée talked about her life, but she was eventually forgotten. She died in 1979, the same year as Jean, and is buried in Thiais, near Paris, in a cemetery for the poor, homeless or disinherited. Her name is engraved on a simple tomb.”

French actress Christa Theret, says Bourdos, was a natural for the part. “When she came to the casting call, knowing nothing about the film, she told me that her father was an artist and her mother often posed for him as his model.”

“As for Vincent (Rottiers), I told him not to think too much about the great director, Jean Renoir, maker of the legendary ‘Grand Illusion’ and ‘Rules of the Game’. In this film, Jean is essentially a young man who has no idea of what he wants to do in life. He’s always been fascinated by his father and then, suddenly, he gets involved with a girl who is much more socially ambitious than he is.”

Another motivation to make the film, says Boudos, was to capture the sun-kissed dazzling glow of the Mediterranean. “Jean-Luc Godard did an admirable job of filming the southern landscapes in ‘Pierrot le Fou’ and ‘Le Mépris’ in the 1960s, but I can’t think of any French movie since then where you feel that same sense of Eden.”

“Renoir” is a Samuel Goldwyn release and opens theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Friday and nationwide on demand.