2024 Movie Gauntlet - 29: Watch a French movie
This was one of the slowest films I think I’ve ever sat through! Not quite to the degree where I’d call it tedious, but literally right before you get there. The runtime is only 2 hours, yet I had to break up my viewing over 3 days because I kept growing restless and struggling to stay focused.
Renoir covers the final years of Impressionist painter Pierre-August Renoir, and his relationships with Andrée Heushling, his final muse, as well as his son Jean. We see the elder Renoir work on his last grand masterpiece, “The Large Bathers,” while coming to terms with his increasingly ill health and advancing arthritis. In the background, Andrée and Jean slowly start to fall for each other and set their sights on careers in the film industry.
Compositionally, this was a beautiful movie. The cinematography purposefully mimicked the vibrant, saturated colors of Renoir’s paintings. There were so many wordless scenes throughout the film where it was just model and painter, sat in nature, lovely to behold. But a sequence of gorgeous images does not an engrossing movie make, and
Renoir suffered greatly from just … not having very much to say. The film chronicled a slice of the painter’s life, but there wasn’t really any intriguing story arc or compelling message to give viewers anything to hang onto while watching.
I think if I was fluent in French, this would maybe be the type of movie I’d put on in the background while crafting or something, but since I needed to rely on subtitles in order to understand anything being said, I had to force myself to commit to sitting down and watching the whole thing. To be completely honest, I felt more entranced, moved and interested in Renoir’s life and work by simply visiting a Renoir exhibit at the Kimball Museum in 2020 and seeing a collection of his late-life nude portraits in person, and I would recommend an experience like that to someone a million times before I’d ever suggest they watch this.
