(She indeed married Jean and became his first star under the name Catherine Hessling.) Even then, the Oedipal tensions are underplayed. Heuschling connects romantically with Jean and pushes him toward the new art of the movies. They include the sight of the arthritis-afflicted Renoir painting with bandaged hands (they actually belong to the notorious forger, Guy Ribes), and model Heuschling’s alternation of tender regard for “the Boss” and instinctive rebellion against the tyranny of male genius.īut it isn’t until Pierre-Auguste’s son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) returns wounded from The Great War that the shock of the new jolts the film into sporadic life. And in his own exacting way, cinematographer Mark Ping Bing Lee brilliantly echoes the Impressionist who believed that color determined structure. That kind of pure yet pagan appreciation is still rare enough to be startling. He brushstrokes his canvas with the aesthetic equivalent of a caress. Set entirely on the French Riviera in 1915, it boasts one hypnotic element: the rapt gaze of Michel Bouquet’s Renoir as he homes in on the unclothed Christa Theret (playing model Andree Heuschling). The shock of the nude and the shock of the new bring much-needed vitality to “Renoir,” a voluptuous, under-dramatized account of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s heroic final phase.
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