The first thing that hits in Cézanne et moi, or Cézanne and I, is the stunning beauty of the landscape. The movie was filmed in Provence, the famously gorgeous south of France. The cinematography by Jean-Marie Dreujou takes you in and around hillsides almost obscenely green and lush. The film looks at the rock faces of mountains, at the serene river valleys. At times the trees and vegetation are thick, and at other times scrub trees dot the hillsides, like northern New Mexico. But you can't avoid the overpowering force and the drama of the green. And all of it is bathed in the golden light that may be a prime reason so much great painting has come from France.
In part, the subject of Cézanne et Moi is light and painting. The story is about the painter Paul Cézanne and his lifelong friend Emile Zola, the great writer of Nana, Gérminal and many other books. At the heart of the relationship between the two is the problem that Zola found success early, and Cézanne, whose work changed the very nature of painting, barely found serious acceptance at all in his lifetime. The two men loved each other, but argued bitterly at times. Zola (Guillaume Canet) sits behind his formidable desk, surrounded by books in his grand house. He's neat and trim, and in spite of his clashes with authority, he looks comfortable and settled. When Zola teases Cézanne about going bald, Cézanne points to Zola's belly -- and neither of them is talking literally about the others body. Zola criticizes Cézanne for refusing to get along with anyone. Cézanne accuses Zola of cozying up to the bourgeoisie.
Cézanne (Guillaume Gallienne) is something of a wild man. His hair is untamed and his clothing disheveled. He’s rude and abrupt; he ruins dinner parties arranged by Zola. Cézanne destroys his own paintings because he hasn’t yet found how to render onto canvas the sights he has somewhere inside his head. Cézanne’s terrible ambition is to figure out how to translate the phenomenal natural beauty to paint on canvas.
You can see that director and writer Danièle Thompson wants to pit the luminous landscapes against the constant ferocious work of the artists and their decades of argument with each other – to show how hard it is to make art even in the presence of the wondrous setting. Sometimes you can see it in the film and accept the irony. Much of the time, though, the landscape wins.
Zola surprises Cézanne at work. He’s beside a cove in a lake. The water is perfect azure; a gorgeous model poses naked on a blanket. They all go to lunch, which takes place at a table outside Cézanne’s home, an old stone house surrounded by trees and flowers. The movie tries to get at the difference between life and art – Cézanne’s wife and model Hortense rages at him for preferring his paintings of her to the actual her -- but everything in the movie – the places, the actors, the buildings – is so lovely it’s hard to worry about such questions.
The guests at dinners include the writer Guy de Maupassant, the painter Camille Pissaro; they talk about Pierre Auguste Renoir and Manet lurks in the background. There’s nobody ordinary in the film. Cézanne and I seems at the same time intimidated and entranced by itself.
It’s the problem of beauty in art. How do you worry about Cézanne’s problems when everything that surrounds him looks so perfect? If you work hard enough, you can think your way to what the film wants to get at, but in that tingling soft light, who cares. You look up and see whitish cliffs with bands of green and slashes of red stone. And in the next moment the picture cradles you in a home magnificently designed with lovely furniture, dinnerware and art objects. Just pass the wine.
