(courtesy IMDb)
Wondrous though it often is, the road to true love, and well beyond into the thorny existential thickets of life, is rarely a smooth and trouble-free journey.
Oh, there is hope and possibility and a future draped in rose-coloured romance and loveliness, but it really plays out the way we think, involving not just a rampant gush of feel-good emotions, but decisions on how we will love and why.
This ages-old truism is on beautifully-rendered and nuanced display in Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe, which takes a languidly but emotionally revelatory journey into the life of famed French painter, illustrator and printmaker, Pierre Bonnard – he was a contemporary and close friend of Claude Monet (played in the film by André Marcon) and part of the avant garde artistic group, Les Nabis, which also included Édouard Vuillard (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) – and his muse, model and great love, Marthe de Méligny (Cécile de France), herself a painter of some note.
Theirs, at least as it is depicted in the film, but you suspect in real life, was a complicated one, definitely borne of deep and abiding attraction, but also tested by years of moving in circles where morality was blurred and art triumphed over near everything.
In Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe we see them through from their meeting in 1893 to Marthe’s death in 1942 in Le Cannet deep in the heart of the southern coast of France, and through the terrors and disruption of World War One aka The Great War.
In this great sweep of years, which jumps decades at a time in the film, a narrative approach which largely works, especially given the rather poetic ways that shifts in time and scene are linked, we see a couple who first delight in each other, then fall into fractious togetherness, before a rupturous affair – at one time Bonnard runs away to Rome with an art student and model Renée (Stacy Martin) – threatens to tear apart for good.
In many ways, you could argue it is the trajectory of many a relationship as the first vibrant flushes of new love give way to the humdrum of the known and the unexciting, but in the hands of writer & director Martin Provost, every stage of this great and enduring romantic and artistic partnership feels dramatically alive while also maintaining an air of emotional intimacy.
It is not an easy road in a sense for either of them, though Bonnard clearly has the easier time of it, his artistic pursuits backed by wealthy friends including much-married socialite Misia Sert (Anouk Grinberg), enabling him the time and space to create his works of art, which by the end of his life numbered some 2000 pieces, many of them featuring Marthe, who came from much humbler circumstances.
Marthe is in certain ways, a fabricated personality, telling Pierre she is an orphan and only child, and that her name is Marthe when a later marriage to her painter lover proves it is patently not, but her love for Pierre is clear and certain and when it is betrayed again and again by her lover-then-husband’s womanising, she is manifestly hurt to the point of near-madness (though during his adulterous Rome days, this leads to a fecund period of artistic creation at their country home outside Paris).
While they came from wildly different places, their connection was certain – at one point, Pierre says Marthe is his family, and it is this belated recognition that sees them through the last twenty settled years of their relationship – and it is this great love, tried and tested though it was, that forms the emotional centrepiece of a film that is less a history of art than it is the story of great love during a tumultuous period of history.
Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe sees them through two world wars, a depression and the endless machinations of empires, but these major historical periods, like the art scene of fin de siècle, plays a far lesser role than the love affair of the two eponymous personalities themselves whose worlds, for better or worse, found form in and reason in each other.
It’s this narrative discipline, of not being tempted to devoted the film to a notable period of French art and two seismic shifts in twentieth century politics and society, that serves Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe well.
Many historical biographies, while undeniably fascinating, get lost in the weeds of the events against which, and in which they happen, and while context is often everything, it can often overshadow the compelling lives that should, by rights, be at the heart of the story.
There’s no such risk in Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe which sticks with the love of its protagonists in ways both nuanced and dramatic, and which, in lives full of incident and memory, judiciously chooses key moments which illuminate not simply who they were as people but how their differing backgrounds and approaches to life shaped their life together.
It is a beguiling and beautiful story that affectingly acknowledges how lustrously lovely true love and deep attraction can be, but how for all that romantic beauty and escapist wonder, there can also be darkness and betrayal and loss too.
Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe doesn’t shy away from the darker moments of Pierre and Marthe’s life, using them to underscore that for all their frailties and fallibilities as people, and their obsession, well Pierre’s at least, with art, that their love was the great power and a staple that, though tested, never truly gave way.
It is a thoroughly immersive and beguiling story, one in which we see how great love can be, and how damning too, and how what gives on one hand can take with the other, but overall, what emerges in the slow-moving emotion al thoughtfulness of Bonnard: Pierre et Marthe is how true love, once found, can transform everything and endure well past when everything falls away.