Cezanne and I (Cezanne et moi)

Still life can be a vibrant and energetic expression of painterly vision, but it can also be a flat, lifeless exercise in self-congratulatory meaninglessness. Of the two ends of the spectrum, Cezanne and I definitely falls close to the latter. A largely inoffensive but thoroughly uninspired work of seemingly legitimate hero worship, writer/director Daniele Thompson’s exploration of the lifelong friendship between Emile Zola and Paul Cezanne falls prey to the Achille’s heel of many overly sincere biopics — namely, that it fails to find a compelling story in its undeniably interesting biographies. As such, Cezanne and I is more stillbirth than still life.

Playing more along the lines of a made-for-TV BBC prestige drama than a fully fledged film in and of itself, Cezanne and I is distinguished by many of the drawbacks of period biopics, with few of the points I can typically mention in their favor. Although the central performances are relatively strong (Guillaume Gallienne as Cezanne, Guillaume Canet as Zola), the pacing is atrocious, and the story doesn’t really dig any deeper than its superficial exploration of contemporaneous famous people hanging out. In the end, the film lacks the vitality and formalism of Cezanne’s paintings or the naturalistic positivism of Zola, coming across as little more than a tepid homage to the artistic geniuses it seeks to lionize rather than a genuine attempt to get to know them.

Thompson seems more interested in structural conceits than actual structure, employing a flaccid framing device that bookends her narrative with a confrontation between Cezanne and Zola regarding the later’s novel L’Oeuvre, the protagonist of which bears more than a passing resemblance to Cezanne. The film then flashes back to the pair’s primary school meet-cute and proceeds to document notable chapters in their multidecade relationship with the aid of on-screen dates popping up every now and then to indicate the passage of time. As a bit of an aside, I have to point out that if a filmmaker feels the need to literally tell the audience how much time has passed in the narrative after every 15 minutes of screen time, something has gone horribly wrong with the script.

At its most engaging, Cezanne and I visually references the works of Cezanne and his Impressionist contemporaries, but the film’s aesthetic invocations of works by Manet or Renoir feel distinctly like the cheap reproductions one might find on the dorm-room wall of a pretentious college freshman — pale imitations. So, in the end, we’re left with a film with little story to speak of that’s occasionally interesting to look at but has little else to recommend it to audiences. Cezanne, Zola, et. al. deserved better than this. Rated R for language, sexual references and nudity. French with English subtitles. Now playing at Grail Moviehouse.