A Visit to the Louvre (2004)
Let me lay my cards on the table before we go any further: experimental, avant-garde cinema has never really been my thing. I find it fascinating in theory and frequently maddening in practice, and A Visit to the Louvre is about as pure a test of that tension as anyone could design. It is not a bad film in the way a sloppily made blockbuster is bad. It is a film made with complete conviction, by filmmakers who know exactly what they are doing. It just happens to leave me almost entirely cold.
The film is the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, a pair whose austere, uncompromising style I have bumped into before. I reviewed Sicily! and came away thinking "interesting, but not for me," and this one pushes their minimalism right to the edge of what you can reasonably call cinema at all. For the best part of fifty minutes, it offers a series of static shots of paintings inside the Louvre, over which a voice reads out, in French, the painter Cézanne's thoughts on the works. His opinions, his arguments with the old masters, his sense of what painting can and cannot do. And that, more or less, is the whole film.
Taken purely as images, there is something to it. The paintings are the paintings, and the camera lets you sit with them, which is no bad thing in itself. There is a patience to it, a refusal to hurry you along or underline anything with music or clever editing, and I can see the philosophical position behind that choice. If you are going to let Cézanne speak, you do not need to jazz it up.
But as a piece of filmmaking, it is so stripped back as to feel almost inert. The entire weight of the thing rests on that spoken commentary, and if, like me, your French is far from fluent and there is little else to lean on but the sound of the words themselves, most of that value drifts away untranslated. What you are left with is a slideshow with a voiceover you cannot fully follow. And at forty-nine minutes, it feels a good deal longer than it is.
I want to be fair here, because I think fairness matters when a film is this deliberately uncommercial. Straub and Huillet have devoted admirers who prize exactly this kind of rigour, this absolute refusal to entertain in any conventional sense, and I have no doubt a French-speaking cinephile steeped in Cézanne would take far more from it than I did. There are people for whom this is precisely the point: strip everything away, trust the source, do not condescend to the viewer. I respect that position even when it does not work for me.
But I can only write about what it gave me, and what it gave me was a genuinely wonderful subject rendered about as unengagingly as I can picture. The Louvre is one of the great buildings on earth. Cézanne is one of the great eyes in the history of painting. Putting the two together and producing something that tests my patience more than it rewards it is, in its own way, quite an achievement.
Two stars. And a rare case where I would genuinely rather just go and wander round the actual Louvre myself.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2026-08-20
