Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Thor Klein, Lena Vurma
Starring: Olivia Vinall, Alexander Scheer, Luis Gerardo Mendez, Ryan Gage
In my school, art lessons were predicated upon creativity and technique, not art history. Paintings, sculpture, installations: this was stuff which remained a complete mystery to me. It's not like music, which you heard for free every day and naturally developed a taste for; or reading, which, once you're literate and engaged and have a library card, is another natural evolution. I mean, I knew of artists and art, but had no idea what any of it meant. Even visiting galleries (like the one in Cardiff's National Museum, now one of my favourite places in the world) made me feel restless and frustrated: I didn't understand what I was supposed to be looking at and appreciating. I had no frame of reference (pun not intended, etc). So, as an avid autodidact, a little while ago I decided to learn a few principles. Not because I wanted to become an expert, or due to some perceived intellectual shame, but more that I believe the more stuff you're interested in, the more varied, exciting and compelling life becomes. Thus, with the aforementioned library card, I took out a few books. Got a Pinterest account. Visited as many galleries as I could. As we know, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and just like that I had a new passion to obsess over (the most important realisation was to not complicate matters, and simply approach each painting with an open heart and mind, recognising first how it makes you feel and going from there. Like you would pop music). This belated epiphany coincided with a cultural rediscovery of Leonora Carrington, the major British/Mexican Surrealist painter who is the subject of Thor Klein and Lena Vurma's (co-directors and co-writers, with script support from Elena Poniatowska) biopic Leonora in the Morning Light.
Edifyingly, this correlation meant that the art blogs and the weekend supplements I read at the time were talking about Carrington's body of work and evaluating the oeuvre with fresh eyes in an illuminating retrospective. So lucky to have this wonderful artist as my gateway point, with her vivid portrayals of human/animal hybrids, suggestive tableaus, the precise pastel wash of her palette. Because it's so playful and cartoony, Surrealism is a good place to start art appreciation anyway, but once you get past the smug jokes (it's a picture of a pipe, do you see?) and vulgarity (I can't remember where I saw it, but one of the most instructive observations I read during my home-schooling was that Dalí "painted with the hand of a masturbator"- !), it can be a bit exhausting. But Carrington's work has none of this masculine swagger and is instead deeply emotional with its witty use of occult symbolism and creamy colours.
Accordingly, Leonora in the Morning Light opens with the lush colours of a Mexican landscape, a small car pootling in the bottom of the frame like a wayward blob of red paint. Cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru shoots the film with lush optical imagination. Within the first act we see Carrington (a very good Olivia Vinall) wander through Las Pozas, a sprawling surrealist sculpture garden far within the Xilitla jungle built by her patron Edward James; the frame depicting skeletal columns which rise from the forest soil and suspended platforms which offer unnatural views of the fecund surroundings. This illustrative approach is vital for the film, as it not only reflects the esoteric language of Carrington's work, but also gives shape and purpose to the narrative.
It's been a running theme this year that the biopic's first hurdle is how to corral real life (shapeless, the definition of quotidian) into the aesthetic patterns of narrative cinema. Here Klein and Vurma adopt a successful non-linear approach, which dips between a much older Leonora, scenes from her affair with Max Ernst, her later life in Mexico and a fisheye lens rendition of her childhood. We see her rub shoulders with Dalí and André Breton, and are privy to the sexual intensity of her relationship with Ernst. It is everything you'd hope to see in a biography of an attractive artist in the 1930s - people say things like "aren't the gates of heaven ever so close to hell?", while the mise-en-scene of her time with Ernst in Southern France is a pure bohemia of smudged paint, candlelight and nudity. Basically, the life you and I would have loved to have lived. And for a while, it's an existence which Leonora enjoys too. In a standout scene of their routinely wondrous day to day, we see the pair casually working on an incredible outdoor bas-relief in the you-wash-and-I'll-dry domestic co-operation which most couples enact when doing housework. "How sweet is our life?", Ernst questions, perhaps tempting fate. After all, legends are not minted without tragedy...
In 1939, Ernst was interned as an "undesirable foreigner" in Camp des Milles. The film pitches this moment as a watershed for Leonora, and a catalyst for her ongoing struggles with mental health. Leonora in the Morning Light makes currency of the old genius/madness dichotomy, which I'm not sure you can always trust but in this case rings true as Carrington was operating on another level (witness the fairy-tale wonder of The Giantess with its flocking prehistoric birds and imperial femininity): "I hide images deep inside so they won't discover me," she discloses. Left alone without the love of her life, we see Leonora spiral - literally, as she daubs a concentric symbol on the wall of the farmhouse in expressively creepy scenes. This causally leads to the indignity of Cardiazol shock therapy, and her ensuing escape to Mexico where she starts a family with Chiki and lives out the remaining years of her life (a twist of fortune - the country was far quicker to catch on to Carrington's genius than European critics were).
It is never a given that the life of an artist will be as urgent and thrilling as their work, but in the case of Leonora in the Morning Light the subject is incredibly rich (take a look at Carrington's wiki page - it is extensive). There are occasionally forays into more dreamlike storytelling – a motif of her fantastical creatures imposing on the real world as part of her psychosis - but ultimately Klein and Vurma have little need for visual gimmickry as their central figure is so compelling. Re my ongoing art study, the recent technological development of AI has further shaped my paradigm. The concept of artificially generated art just seems so pointless: we know that this didn't come from a person, an individual like us but with superlative imagination and the technical skills to realise it. It will never shock, move, or inspire us with evidence of the wonders which people are capable of in the manifest way that art does. Art is informed by the life which made it, an essential humanity that Leonora in the Morning Light essays. We end on a sunshine yellow wash of Leonora painting; in this extended sequence, we observe the rudimentary truth of the artist at work.
Leonora in the Morning Light is in UK/ROI cinemas from May 29th.
