Despite the hundreds of books and catalogues devoted to the art of Pierre Bonnard, we are obliged to piece together his life from a mass of unreliable snippets. The major authority was his great-nephew, Antoine Terrasse (1928-2013), but the family connection can also act as a form of censorship, ensuring that difficult or disreputable stories are avoided. This was famously the case with Henri Matisse, whose reputation was fiercely guarded by his heirs until 2009 when we saw the first installment of Hilary Spurling’s two-volume biography.
After Matisse, Bonnard (1867-1947) is arguably the most important French artist of the 20th century. Picasso despised his work, calling it “a pot-pourri of indecision”, while Matisse was among his most fervent admirers. He remains an ‘artist’s artist’, his tremulous brushwork and distinctive use of colour finding disciples in each new generation.
Martin Provost’s Bonnard, Pierre & Marthe, attempts to bring the fractured, half-glimpsed details of Bonnard’s life to the screen. As the title suggests, the film devotes equal time to the artist’s wife, Marthe, the subject of hundreds of paintings. As Marthe grew old, she remained miraculously young in Bonnard’s pictures.
Madame Bonnard has always been an enigma, and this film walks a line between what is concealed and revealed. It begins in 1893 when Marthe (Cécile de France) is posing for Bonnard (Vincent Macaigne), who had accosted her in the street and asked her to model for him. The studio session develops into an affair, but she never plays straight with her partner. Her real name was Maria Boursin, but she told Bonnard it was Marthe de Méligny, daughter of down-at-heel Italian aristocrats. She also claimed to have no living relations, which the film quickly exposes as a lie, when she visits her invalid mother.
Provost tiptoes around the most problematic parts of Marthe’s biography, as both she and her surviving sister realised their only path out of poverty was to make a good match. Whether this touched on actual prostitution is unclear and wouldn’t be that unusual for a working class Parisienne scraping a living by sewing artificial flowers. It’s also alleged that Marthe was briefly married before she came to live with Bonnard, but that detail is buried in scenes in which she simply abandons him after being embarrassed during a visit to his high-class friends, the Natansons.
What we know to be true is that Bonnard would develop a passionate lifelong attachment to Marthe. The rest is a matter of speculation, with Marthe being stigmatised as jealous, neurotic and possessive – a negative force that held Bonnard back, a hypochondriac who spent her days lying in the bath. True or false, he stayed by her side, even allowing for a momentary breakdown, when he began an affair with a younger woman, Renée Monchaty (Stacy Martin).
Provost has given us a romance in which Pierre and Marthe’s relationship survives one blow after another, from their Bohemian days in the Belle Époque to old age in the south of France. We watch as Marthe is shamed and infuriated by Bonnard’s friend, Misia (Anouk Grinberg), the femme fatale of the era, whom we track through successive marriages. We spy on Marthe’s secretive visits to her bed-ridden mother, and her struggles with Pierre’s infidelity. When he runs off with Renée, she takes over his studio and begins to paint her own pictures.
It’s hard to produce a bio-pic about a great artist without scenes that seem stagey and ridiculous. Provost has made a good attempt, but there are moments that set one’s teeth on edge, as Bonnard and his friends explain who they are, what they stand for, and how they are going to “revolutionise modern painting”. People only ever talk like that in movies.
Telescoping fifty years into two hours requires precise choices as to what makes the final cut. Provost has focused on Bonnard’s early years, emphasising a friendship with Claude Monet (André Marcon) rather than his late connection with Matisse, who never makes an appearance. Misia is a central focus, as a kind of inverted mirror of Marthe. She is a sacred monster, the eternal centre of attention, whereas Marthe prefers to stay in the shadows.
There’s a great deal we don’t know about the momentous affair with Renée, but the idea that she shared a ménage à trois with Pierre and Marthe feels a little strained. If Marthe comes across as anxious and secretive, Renée is positively deranged.
The point Provost is trying to make is that Bonnard may have been infatuated with Renée, but he was tied to Marthe by deep, psychological needs. Over the years the couple became indivisible, not just in their domestic life, but through the artist’s reliance on his wife as muse and model. Call it a co-dependent relationship, but it lasted.
Vincent Macaigne is excellent in the lead role, capturing Bonnard’s pathological need to work, which could make him seem diffident or unworldly. There is, however, an underlying confidence that Picasso never recognised. Macaigne manages to paint in a convincing manner, which is rare in an artist bio-pic.
Cécile de France is equally good as Marthe, although far too tall for the role. She captures that introverted, sullen aspect which baffled Bonnard’s friends and acquaintances, who could never understand what he saw in her. There is a solidity to the character that makes Stacy Martin’s Renée seem fragile and superficial. We can see from the first that Bonnard’s attempt to break free will end in failure.
By now we’re unlikely to learn any more about a relationship that has fascinated everyone who has ever sought to understand Bonnard’s work. Pierre without Marthe is simply unthinkable as she is such a dominant presence in his paintings – from the nymph who lies bottoms up in the National Gallery of Victoria’s La Sieste (1900), to the ageless, golden figure occupying her bath like a mummy in a sarcophagus in late pictures such as La Grande Baignoire (1937-39).
The painting that may be the key to this unsolvable riddle is Man and Woman (1900) in the Musée d’Orsay, which shows Pierre and Marthe, both naked, in the bedroom. He’s standing, she’s sitting on the bed with a bent knee; between them a tall, dark screen splits the picture in half. They’re in the same claustrophobic interior but inhabit different worlds. The work, which makes a fleeting appearance in the film, was painted at a time when the couple were estranged. Within the following years they would be living together as man and wife, although they wouldn’t marry until 1925. Man and Woman captures a moment of great intimacy, between two people who are paradoxically separated. In later life, even when Pierre had fled to Rome with a young lover, he and Marthe would never be apart.
Bonnard, Pierre & Marthe
Directed by Martin Provost
Written by Marc Abdelnour & Martin Provost
Starring: Vincent Macaigne, Cécile de France, Stacy Martin, André Marcon, Anouk Grinberg, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Hélène Alexandris, Peter Van den Begin, Stanislas Merhar
France/Belgium, MA 15+, 123 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 14 September, 2024