Renoir
There’s a fascinating factoid at the centre of Renoir, Gilles Bourdos’s film about the old painter Pierre-Auguste and his son, the future-filmmaker Jean. Both men shared the same muse. Andrée Heuschling was the last in a long line of life models for the aged Impressionist, a celebrity painter who by the end of the First World War was wracked with rheumantoid arthritis and coming towards the end of his life. She was also the woman who encouraged his son, Jean, wounded and back from the battlefront, to give up ideas about being a ceramicist and to go into film-making. In Bourdos’s telling of the story, Heuschling essentially offers Renoir a deal – you … Read more