When I was a child my parents took me to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Being there was like walking through a dream: on every wall characters and colors popped out at me, beckoning. For many hours I was lost in the most glorious images I'd ever seen – landscapes and cityscapes, crucifixions and celebrations, flowers and fields, battlefields and heavens.
When I say lost, I meant that literally.
I had a vivid imagination as a child and so as I stood in front of the works of some of the greatest painters in the world, I found I was drawn not only to look at a canvas but go into the painting itself. Staring intently, practically catatonically, at the shadows of Claude Monet's depictions of London, I found myself mentally wandering through the artist's pastel blue streets, smiling at the people swirling by me, making up a story for every painting. Likewise, I mind-melded with Jacques-Louis David's "The Intervention of the Sabine Women," gluing myself to the skirts of a woman in red and making up my own story for what was happening in the scene.
Watching The Painting, a lush and thought-provoking French animated film that screened this month in the Seattle International Film Festival's Films 4 Families series, was like stepping back into this childhood moment. It brought me back to a time when I truly believed there was an alternate universe – a "life" — inside the paintings I saw, inside the television I watched, inside the toy chest at night when I was sleeping.
The Painting depicts the story of the characters who live in an unfinished work of art. It is also a story about the thorny issue of racism, a touchy subject handled here with incredible creativity and power.
Three classes of people live in the painting that is the world of this film. The Allduns are the characters the artist completely finished painting before abandoning the work. They are regally dressed and dance their days away in a golden castle. The Halfies are those he almost finished – but not quite. The Sketchies are simple line drawings – they are literally sketches of the people the painter had in mind when he began his work. With the painter away, possibly never to return, the Allduns have assumed control over what happens in the painting and have deemed themselves superior to the Halfies and Sketchies.
In fact, they have banished these lesser castes from the castle, forcing them to live in the jungle-like garden below. Worse, the Allduns consider the Sketchies so inferior as to be almost inhuman and thus they chase them like animals.
Sound familiar? Insert slavery, Nazi Germany, Bosnia, other-race-based atrocity here. I don't know about you, but I had a hard time talking to my young children about such blights on human history. Had this film been around when my kids were young, I would have used it as the wonderful cinematic launching pad that it is – an astute entre into discussions of equality, bullying, and the importance of accepting differences. As it was, I watched it with my kids who are now 16 and 13 and it still this film led to great and deep conversation.
What happens when an Alldun falls in love with a Halfie? At the heart of The Painting is a love story — two characters that see beyond the black and while world the Allduns have created. Can love win out agaist class? Should it?
Even if you choose not to tackle such weighty issues, The Painting is a terrific family film, full of drama, slight on violence and dedicated to showing that people from different walks of life can and do belong in the same picture.
That a painting would so engage the viewer that he or she felt literally carried right into the piece, riding its rivers, climbing its trees, seems to me to be the dream of the artist. The Painting open for me and my kids the world of both art and the artist. When we went to the Seattle Art Museum recently I found myself looking at the paintings differently – or, more accurately, returning to my childhood ways. I found myself wanting to step inside the paintings. My kids did too.
What we found is this: Every painting has as many stories as it has viewers. Every painting is an opportunity for a child to find its story and in turn incorporate important life lessons.
The Painting has not yet been released beyond film festivals. To read more about The Painting ~ the title is Le Tableau in it's original French ~ go online to www.letableau-lefilm.fr. You will need to click the button that translate the site into English unless you speak French. You may also order the DVD of the film online.
