Cezanne and me

There are two films here. 

One is the lyrical short buried behind the end credits. An establishing shot of Mt St Victoire dissolves into the series of Cezanne’s increasingly abstracted oil paintings of that mountain. As it recalls Picasso’s (and later Lichtenstein’s) series of increasingly abstract representations of a bull, it helps to explain Picasso’s quote: “Cezanne was the father of us all.” This fluid montage of Cezannes shows — but doesn’t enunciate — his revolutionary genius as an original artist. Unfortunately, the titles distract us from the images and most viewers walk out during the sequence anyway. What could have been the core is a throwaway.

Then there’s the film narrative itself, which entirely omits any explanation of Cezanne’s specific importance. We see some of his major works and his exclusion from the establishment but we get no clear sense of what exactly made his art important. Even the film’s title veers us away from him to the perspective of his friend Emile Zola. 

Such a glaring omission or bias can only be intentional. That is, this film putatively about Cezanne and Zola is not really about their respective arts and achievements at all. Cezanne’s artistic breakthrough and Zola’s naturalist novels and his unfashionable defence of Alfred Dreyfuss are just alluded to, not explored. They’re just part of the setting, like the top hats and cravats — and all the beautiful young naked women.

Writer/director Daniele Thompson has rather other fish to fry. To wit, the human failure of the conventionally successful male in the patriarchal culture. She uses these two towering male authorities as a case study in the pathetic neediness and shallowness of the male ego. It’s a feminist’s anatomy of a classic bromance, with Cezanne as Butch, say, to Zola's Sundance. There’s even a gal-pal Ella to absolve them of any hint of homophilia. The working class Alexandrine passes from Cezanne’s mistress/model to Zola’s wife to oblivion. 

Thompson assumes we know the importance of the men so she opts not to explore or to explain their work. Instead she exercises the familiar conventions/cliches of the artist’s dilemma. The Romantic Artist (Cezanne) flouts all artistic and social convention and seems doomed to the purity of poverty and obscurity. To be an Artist is to be wildly, self-destructively independent. In the other corner, the compromised artist (Zola) bends his passion to the winds of the day, to succeed in the marketplace. He can be riskily political (cp Dreyfuss Affair) but his ambition will be bourgeois. Their disdain is mutual.

In an invented anecdote, our heroes first meet in a schoolyard when young Cezanne rushes in to save Zola from bullies. It’s love at first fight. That’s how their passion will continue. With another lad who shortly disappears, the boys grow into men, at home in the Paris streets and cafes, chafing with ambition and struggling to survive. 

The friendship survives through — not despite — the two men’s violent arguments and lengthy periods of separation. Zola hates but envies Cezanne’s libertinism, eventually surrendering himself to his new young laundress who gives him the children his long-suffering Alexandrine couldn’t. Cezanne believes that Zola exploited Cezanne’s life and character to find fame and fortune. To Cezanne, Zola exploited him the way he himself exploits his models.  

This is a story of two successful creators who failed at life and humanity. They became famous but remained needy and pathetic. Both are so insecure that their successes can’t attenuate their self-loathing (Cezanne) or smugness (Zola). In their last scene together Zola doesn’t know Cezanne hears him publicly dismiss the painter as a “genius, but stillborn.” Cezanne weeps for days at Zola’s death because their feeling for each other never found an acceptable form. 

Though both men constantly discuss their girlfriends past and present — equally marginal — neither has any true feeling for their supposedly beloved. They neglect them in favour of fresher, shallower mistresses. The painter is enchanted with the colours and shapes of his wife’s body while painting her, but shows no interest in the real woman before him. Zola puts a form of this complaint by Alexandrine into the novel that leaves his friend feeling ultimately betrayed. 
     The one woman artist Berthe Morisot appears briefly to flash her bosom and laugh off Cezanne’s insulting proposal of a snuggle. Despite being an artist the woman is treated as just another model. As Thompson knows, art has always been the male’s preserve, where boys will remain boys however old and brilliant they may become. They remain fascinated with the malleable outer form of women and too terrified to approach their individuating depths. So they save their passion for each other — carefully camouflaged and suppressed for respectability. Zola’s “Cezanne and me” is really about the aloof, needy little Zola himself, hiding his airy superiority behind his literary naturalism.