Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe

Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe (2024) is a French-Belgian period romance you can watch online on iFILM. Director Martin Provost tells the story of painter Pierre Bonnard and the woman who turns up on a third of his canvases, with Vincent Macaigne and Cécile de France in the leads.

A young Bonnard meets Marthe de Méligny, who introduces herself as an aristocrat. No papers, no traceable past, a name she invented — a riddle that will stay sealed for over three decades. She sits to pose and slowly becomes the center of everything he paints. Their bond doesn't fit the manners of the turn of the century: jealousy, affairs, long separations and returns, and out of all that grows work flooded with light and color. Other figures of the Paris art scene drift through the frame too — Stacy Martin appears as the painter's lover.

Provost, who already mined an artist's life in Séraphine, skips the grand-genius portrait for the story of two people who can neither live together nor part. It's one for viewers who like slow European cinema about desire and making art, not a march through textbook dates. Stream Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe (2024) online on iFILM.