Cezanne and I -- Movie review
Cezanne and I
Directed
by Daniéle Thompson
This film is a little hard to follow. It is a good film and I liked it a lot. I think I would like to see it again. The problem is they way they have put it
together. It starts out with Cezanne
coming to meet his friend, Emile Zola, at his residence late in their
lives. Then it begins flashing back to
scenes from earlier in their lives going all the way back to the beginning of their
friendship that started in a schoolyard brawl.
Sometimes it flashes forward, then backward, then back to the opening
scene, which one takes to be the "present." Sometimes it is a little hard to tell who is
who and what the connections are between the various people at these different
times and in different settings. To the
credit of the filmmakers they do place visual captions indicating the date and
place of the changing scenes, but it is still hard to keep it all in your head
as you watch it, since we did not experience these times and places. For example, I understand the difference
between 1970 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and 1990 San Francisco very well, but
between 1860 Aix en Provence, France, and 1880 Paris, I don't have as good a
conception. So flipping back and forth
between these varying places and scenes can be disorienting. A second viewing would probably be very
helpful. Another problem is that Emile
Zola's calls his wife Alexandrine, but Cezanne calls her Gabrielle, which seems
to have been a "professional" name she used before she became Zola's
wife. Cezanne and "Gabrielle"
apparently have a history predating her role as Emile Zola's wife. It took me a while to catch on to that, so I
didn't realize they were talking about the same woman.
The film is very condensed and abbreviated, but then, how
can you tell the story of two people and their relationship extending over more
than forty years in less than two hours?
There is a lot of ambivalence in this relationship. These two guys argue a lot. Sometimes they don't seem to like each other
very much, but they have a deep connection that transcends their many personal
differences. It is a rather searching
inward exploration of these two men. I
began to realize that this is the only way for Cezanne to feel comfortable in a
personal relationship. There needs to be
antagonism. Cezanne was antagonistic and
combative toward everyone. He was very
probably borderline, with pronounced paranoia.
It's a wonder he didn't go completely crazy. Probably his friendship with Zola and his
relationship with Hortense, a young woman who posed for him in his later years
and who bore two children with him, is all that kept him in one piece.
One noticeable deficiency in this film is the lack of
emphasis on Cezanne's paintings. He is
said to have painted about 1000 paintings, most of which are in museums around
the world. I saw a magnificent exhibit
of Cezanne's paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in
2006. There must have been several
hundred paintings in the exhibit.
However, in this film, very few of his paintings appear. The film is not interested in his paintings;
it is interested in presenting his personality and his relationship with
Zola.
I've never read anything by Zola, so I don't know much about
him. The relationship depicted
represents what we might see as a relic of the nineteenth century, that is, a
close personal friendship between two men of considerable intimacy and
emotional intensity. That kind of
relationship is extremely rare these days in the United States outside of the
gay community, but in the nineteenth century it was quite commonplace. I have written in other places about the
changes in men's relatedness over the last hundred years or so and the impact
it has had on men's lives and on society.
You can find them posted on this website.1
The character of Cezanne emerges very well from this
film. His art and the relationship
between his person and his art do not.
But the central theme of the film, namely the lifelong relationship
between the two friends, Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola, is very well represented
and probably works better without undue intrusion from the art of either
man. You have to make decisions when you
make a film and if you spend a lot of time exploring the artistic development
of one man or both, then you have less time to explore their personal
relationship. The filmmakers chose to
explore the personal relationship, and they have accomplished their purpose
very effectively. But unless you are
French or steeped in French culture, you may need a second look before it will
all gel and cohere.
1.
Review of Picturing men: A Century
of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography. By John Ibson. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
2002. Reviewed in the Journal of Homosexuality Vol. 55, No. 2,
2008.
Also, Was Abraham Lincoln Gay? Journal
of Homosexuality 57:1124-1147, 2010.