The Belgian-born actress Yolande Moreau has enjoyed a 30-year career in French theater and film but remains virtually unknown in the United States. That may change for art house audiences with her extraordinary performance in the difficult title role of “Séraphine” (June 5), which dominated the 2009 Césars, France’s version of the Oscars, with seven awards, including best actress for Ms. Moreau.
The movie covers the later years in the life of Séraphine de Senlis, a deeply devout, middle-aged provincial cleaning woman who, at the behest of her guardian angel, became a recognized outsider artist before dying at 78 in a mental hospital in 1942. Playing a character who in an earlier era might have been seen as a saint and in ours as bipolar or schizophrenic presents a double challenge. Ms. Moreau meets it with a largely physical performance that is as subtle as it is vigorous.
The impoverished Séraphine, who speaks very little, is a Clydesdale of domestic industry, and Ms. Moreau uses her ample body to make a viewer feel the relentless burden of her work. But she also makes Séraphine fascinating in her sharp-eyed alertness to everything around her, whether it’s the contempt and condescension of people she works for or, more pleasurably, the most minute details of the natural world, details that find their way into the bold, ecstatic paintings she makes with ingredients that include animal blood and a particularly dark local soil when everyone else is asleep. In effect, her Séraphine leads a double life, one of them deeply thrilling. There’s a delicious moment when, having stolen the wax from two votives in the local church’s shrine to the Virgin Mary, she looks up at the Mother of God with an expression of guilty apology and irrepressible joy.
Ms. Moreau first made her name with comedy, including a fascinating one-woman stage piece in 1982 called “A Dirty Business of Sex and Crime,” portions of which can be seen in “When the Sea Rises,” her César-winning debut as a film director. But it is her dramatic work in “Séraphine” that remains indelible, not least because of her boundless commitment to her character, which is summed up in the movie’s most piercing scene.
When Séraphine is at her nadir in an isolation cell, flat on her back, straitjacketed and bound to her bed, Ms. Moreau conveys her anguish and desperation not with the thrashing that is a staple of such scenes but with something worse, the almost unbearable spectacle of a weeping woman helplessly choking on her own grief.
Da The New York Times, 3 Maggio 2009
