A 15-year-old girl, Andrée Heuschlingin (Christa Theret) an orange-yellow dress and matching jacket peddles a bike along a path in the lush countryside of Southern France in summer. She stops at a gate of a huge garden, pushes it open, is met by a gamin, Coco Renoir (Thomas Doret) playing in the garden, asks to see Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet ) saying that she was ordered to come by Madame Renoir, is told that she is dead, carries on, meets the 74-year old painter sitting by the window in the sun, painting, repeats that she was told by Madame Renoir to come because there might be work for her there. The old Renoir studies her, amused, and asks her to show him her hands and says that since she is there, she can pose for him. She sits down on a chair, is asked to shift her position so that the sun may fall on her profile, and the old Renoir continues painting. After a while, she's told that she's done for the day. Renoir asks that she be given 5 francs. She leaves and turns her face to peek at what Renoir has painted and discovers that there are only 5 green apples in light green.She asks where is she in the painting. Renoir tells her to come the following day. As she is leaving, she says angrily that she charges 10 franc per session, not 5. She is ignored. The following day, she returns and the following and the following....
The film is about the relationship between this girl and Auguste Renoir and his 21 year-old son Jean Renoir, who later went on to be a famous film director. There really is not much of a story and such narrative as there is serves merely as just so many pretexts for the director to "paint" a living portrait of the old Renoir and show us on celluloid the delicious skin and curves of Andrée and the profile of the old Renoir in the warm Mediterranean sun, the sunlight on the wood, the green leaves and as reflected on the surface of the streams. The old Renoir is troubled by athritis who would make him scream horribly at night but he keeps painting because he has an irresistible fondness for the delicate skin of young ladies, who all first started posing for him and ended up being either his wife, his housekeeper or maid. In the film, his second son Jean Renoir (Vincent Rottiers) returns from the war on sick leave because of a leg injury, falls in love with Andrée and promises her that once the war is over, he'd be her partner in a new invention which he created, motion picture, something which the old Renoir thought interesting but of little value as a form of art, which he thought should capture the vitality of life, something which explains why he always wanted live models. In the film, we are shown the old Renoir, a grumpy old man and autocrat, referred to by all the women in the house as "le Patron" (the boss) pontificating on everything not just on his own view of what art should be, a liberal as far as what his children may want to do including letting his first two sons to serve in the French army and the third to be home schooled.
What saves the film from a complete failure as a drama or the portraits of the latter part of the life of the old Renoir or the development of his son Jean Renoir as a film director (something almost completely non-existent) is the quality of its beautiful music, composed specially for the film by Alexandre Desplat and the qualtity its photography done by Taiwanese born photographer Mark Ping-Bing Lee: the lushness of the Mediterannean trees, its leaves, the crystal clarity of its sparkling waters, the play of sunlight upon the profiles of its characters and various objects either indoors or outdoors is simply stunningly beautiful and matches perfectly the mood of quiet contemplation of Nature and the beauty of the feminine form in the world of the old Renoir, far from the din of war, something rather more eternal than the vicissitudes of that horrible tragedy called the First World War and secluded and quarantined from the ugliness of the destruction it provoked in the human form in the form of mutilated soldiers, disfigured faces, soldier missing an arm, a leg, an eye, hobbling and limping along as living proof of the "deformation" of humanity, also emphasized I think deliberately by a number of shots on rotting flesh of animals in the countryside and also butchered rabbits, birds, disemboweled fishes.etc in Renoir's kitchen. In that sense, Renoir's paintings and his life at the Riviera, the
simplicity of his lines, the intimacy and voluptuousness of the feminine
form, the softness and the opulence of his color tones, often suffused
by the warmth of the sunlight, the vitality of his greens, the purity of
his blues, the warmth of his yellows, browns and red, the mixing and
merging of one color into another, the melting of stiff and clear
boundaries in the paintings of the old Renoir represents literally an
artistic bastion against human ugliness and human butchery. As Renoir says, he wants his
lines and his colors to float and he wants to show not human misery but a bit of its joy. The film is thus more a series of movable tableaux than a narrative. Is that the reason why it never very clear whether its title refers to the old or the young Renoir, artists both, though in different domains?
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