One of the privileges and pleasures of working as a film critic is that people occasionally send me movies that aren’t yet available in the U.S. Some of them are very good—and a precious few are so good that, were they to be shown here, they’d rank among the year’s most significant releases. So it is with a new film from France, released there in June under the title “Vas-Tu Renoncer?” (“Will You Give Up?”), by the veteran independent filmmaker Pascale Bodet. It’s listed on IMDb under the title of “Edouard and Charles,” the names of the two main characters: the painter Édouard Manet and the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. The film is based on the historical friendship between the two men (whose last names are never mentioned), but is set in the present day. Bodet depicts both figures as simultaneously of their time and outside of it, and this unresolved ambiguity lends the movie a tone, combining intellectual earnestness and screwball comedy, that’s as audacious and distinctive as it is deftly sustained. “Vas-Tu Renoncer?” confronts the eternal drama of art and commerce, aesthetics and institutions, and the slings and arrows that boldly original artists are often condemned to endure. It condenses these grand themes into a tense, pressurized, yet lyrically comical span of just seventy-one minutes. Édouard (Benjamin Esdraffo)—socially awkward, buttoned-up, and self-doubting—is desperate to show the painting that he considers to be his masterwork, “Olympia,” to his brusque and bumptious friend Charles (Pierre Léon), and he embarrassingly cajoles, coaxes, and importunes Charles to come by his studio for a viewing. Charles, for his part, is desperately in need of a grant, which an arts-world bureaucrat named Jeanne Brillo (Marianne Basler) promises to help him get, and he keeps putting Édouard off with vague promises and brazen excuses. Édouard continues to work on the painting as if in the dark, unadvised by Charles, who chases the money ever more shamelessly. When it comes to light that Charles has grossly and selfishly affronted Édouard, a mutual friend, the connoisseur and curator d’Aurilleby (played by Marc Barbé and based […]
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Alice Oseman photographed by Antonio Olmos for the Observer New Review. The creator of the bestselling graphic novels and TV
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