Great Film overall

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Renoir (2012)So promising. And so beautiful without depth. See it if you love beautiful, patient (aka slow) movies. It's set in the French countryside during WWI, and is filled with loving scenes of the fields and woods and streams there, drenched in gorgeous light. And it is filled in wonderful interiors, day and night, including some lovemaking. And it is filled frank nudity, in the name of art.You see, the main character, which should have been the name of the movie, is the model of the great Impressionist painter But late Renoir compared to early Renoir—that is, late works by the painter compared to early works by the filmmaker—are no contest. One artist is checking out, and leering and relaxing. The other is striving and incomplete, entering a new medium and a new age. History might say that the father was more important overall, and I agree that some of his early paintings are monstrously perfect. But by the 20th Century, some 30 or 40 years after his heyday, it's another story, and his studies, many of them nudes, are weak and indefinite. I teach art history, which is no great claim, but I study and look at this stuff all the time, and late Renoir is to be avoided!Not so early Renoir, the son, the film director. By 1939 Jean had made one of the truly great masterpieces of the period, in any medium: "Rules of the Game," as it's called in English. It gives away his own familiarity with the rich and cultured world of France before WWII. It gives away what he disdained about his upbringing, in fact, as he critiques it in the film, with a laugh and some true pathos. That's 20 years after what you see here, but this is a film site, and if you want to connect the dots, see that one.But look, this isn't a documentary, it's a movie, a bio-pic in a way, lush as it is. And it's slow. It avoids actual depth and substitutes profound (and often touching) commentary. It resides in the color and light and smoke made during the filming, which isn't really the point—except for the flimmakers. In a way I'd say it conjurs up the time, in a precious and empty way, very well. No contradiction intended. It won several best costume awards.But be prepared. If you love art and love Renoir, you'll be disappointed, in the end. (The paintings in the film were made by a notorious forger.) If you just love beautiful films to get lost in, this might do the trick. It's immersive. And it does remind us of the real depths of the original Impressionists and their love of light, and their love of life. That's the real point here. What is the true interest—the beginning of the son's film career, is left a footnote.

And to think I almost didn't see this film because of its ridiculously low IMDb rating. Are those now skewed by investment bankers, flash traders, and other impatient shills of Satan who find the pace of films like Renoir glacial? What a shame, if so. This film recounts and humanizes the final years of one of the world's most revered painters, one who rejected the title of artist. It is an Impressionistically rendered portrait (worth seeing for the Mediterranean light alone) that sparely and delicately portrays a cascade of relationships: between a father and a son 53 years younger, an arthritic painter who came to his métier in his fourth decade and a tempestuous adolescent model, the regenerative radiance of untrammeled eros, a love triangle, a female entourage who devotedly care for and carry le Patron wherever he will paint, a duty-bound WW I biplane pilot and a feisty fetishized lover, a latent filmmaker who here begins shedding his timorous, jejune indifference and later won international renown.It is a masterpiece, a visual, gustatory, and vocal feast, yet one from which music is mostly absent. A lingering, sequestered fin-de-siècle world from which war was mostly distant. A microcosm where vital energy in all its guises was evoked and honored. It prompts you to take in the light, the space, the nourishing gusts from the Mediterranean, the temperate, fertile verdure, the French cadences of early-20th-century rural France.Why so much talk among reviewers of abundant female "nudity" and "nakedness"? After a scene or two, it goes almost unnoticed, so naturally did it blend with the Edenic environs.The film is, perhaps above all, a condensed history of a family permeated by quiet genius and love of art and the arts. One somehow senses its origins and dénouements without being told of them.Renoir (the film) had deficits that others more critically competent than I have detailed. But it's tempting to begrudge Jacques Renoir, Gilles Bourdos and Jérôme Tonnerre the laconic textual bio of Andrée Heuschling (Christa Theret) that rolled by just before the credits. It asserted, not without Schadenfreude, that after her breakup with Jean Renoir in 1931 (not covered in the film), Andrée fell into a life of "obscure poverty".Yet no one actually knows what became of her. Could she not, for all we know, have bested Jean's fate? Might she have found her way to a Sardinian isle like the one where Lina Wertmüller shot Swept Away? A reclusive Impressionist may have offered to make a breezy, clothing-optional life with her in a cliff-side villa there (or so the sequel I'm planning has it). Only Heuschling, unlike Wertmüller's Raffaella, this time opted to stay put and leave the painted porcelain intact.

Sure, the film uses wonderful natural imagery of the French Rivera. Yes, the setting is absolutely beautiful and every tiny detail of the historical setting is well accounted for. Definitely, the score adds well into the film's romantically artistic theme. And still there's the fantastic acting and directing to appreciate. Yet there's a but. The film is so boring that the average viewer will never be patient enough to watch the film till the credits roll, the ending is highly unsatisfying and almost abrupt, and the ultimate point of the film is really unclear and clouded over puzzling and not very meaningful phrases that appear to make the film have a message that it failed to deliver. Was the film discrediting ideals of patriotism over art and individualism or not? Was the film ridiculing so-called 'progressive' and 'open-minded' artists or not? And if one knows the true story behind it, this film really has a bleakness attached to it, and you feel a lot of pity for the lead female character.Not one of the greatest Oscar submissions from France, but hey, the setting could make a lot of tourists go southwards from Paris.

Apologies for my ESL.If you go to cinema for cinematography, or - to French films - for subtlety, precision and nuances in acting, do not go there - you'll be disappointed. Camera is not well with selecting frames and mise-en-scène. Misplaced – and moving – references to still life. Undeveloped primitive dialogs. If you were interested, the "story" is forgotten to be told.I assumed that director loved painter Renoir; I expected it to be in "Renoir" palette and settings, but it appeared in rather "Degas", with pleinair hints to "Pissarro".It was said (Manet?) about Renoir that "he thinks that he is a painter". Gilles Bourdos thinks he is a director.