'Seraphine'

When we first meet Seraphine de Senlis, it's hard not to feel confused. This most ordinary of women, this overweight housekeeper trudging heavily through cobblestone streets in a shapeless black dress, she could not possibly be the subject of a major French motion picture, let alone one that won seven Cesars, including best film, best screenplay, best cinematography and best actress for star Yolande Moreau. There must be some kind of mistake.

There is no mistake. What makes "Seraphine," directed and co-written by Martin Provost, so exceptional is that it neither condescends to nor romanticizes its subject.

Rather, powered by a performance of a lifetime by Belgium-born actress Moreau, it allows us to meet this singular person on her own terms. It permits us to see how ordinary life, extraordinary artistic ability and eccentric mental states can and do exist in the same person.

Seraphine de Senlis was very much a real person, a village cleaning woman who turned out to be a Primitive artist possessed of a powerful talent. One of the satisfactions of watching her moving journey unfold for two decades, starting in 1914, is that, like her art, it refuses to capitulate to the ordinary and the expected.

Rather, as directed by Provost, "Seraphine" is ordered by its own quiet rhythms, by its decision to tell this moving, empathetic story simply and gradually. Confident of the quality of its narrative, this is a film that refuses to be rushed, refuses to reveal itself and its characters until the proper moment.

A long time is spent with Seraphine and her daily routines in the town of Senlis before we have any notion of her as an artist. Stolid and seemingly simple, Seraphine is treated like a piece of furniture by the people she works for, but in her private moments we sense a yearning in her spirit, an unspoken, almost pagan passion for nature in all its manifestations.

When we do see her paintings of flowers and trees, we come to understand that making art is a holy act for Seraphine.

She paints because of a kind of spiritual compulsion, as if she were a devout member of a religion with but a single worshiper. Art is not a choice or an option, but a brutal necessity.

It's hard to convey how subtly yet completely actress Moreau brings this unexpectedly complex woman to our attention. Her Seraphine can seem both indifferent and passionate, timid and bossy, a fierce and stubborn force to be reckoned with who lights up the screen with a delicate half-smile. What we are watching finally is not a performance but a life.