There is unexpected interest in this period-costume dual biopic of Émile Zola and Paul Cézanne, played by Guillaume Canet and Guillaume Gallienne: a drama about their lifelong, troubled friendship. With its sunkissed locations, frock coats and whiskers – and its incurious attitude to the women in these artists’ lives – it does look rather like a bit of stately cinéma du papa. Yet there is an edge and a mordancy to it.
Zola and Cézanne grow up together, and at first Cézanne looks like one of life’s winners: the son of a wealthy banker whose family money allows him to paint. Meanwhile, Zola scrabbles a living in Paris. But then Zola becomes rich and famous, and Cézanne becomes tortured with envious contempt. They are frenemies and frivals; their appreciation of each other’s work coloured by anxious fear of failure, each obsessed with prestige and with being admitted to their respective elite societies.
There is a painful moment when Cézanne conceals himself incognito in a crowd of Zola’s admirers, as he basks in the acclaim following J’Accuse, and hears Zola disparagingly calling him a “stillborn genius”. It is a little like Salieri masochistically forcing himself to listen to Mozart’s contempt in Amadeus. Only they both get to be Mozart in the end.
