THE PAINTING. Fully Realized Masterpiece

The creators’ imagination may have raced ahead of the audience’s. Perhaps paradoxically, that is why the French–Belgian animated film The Painting slipped past world cinemas largely unnoticed. Fortunately, there are a few keywords that can spark interest in Jean-François Laguionie’s film. The Painting is a fully realized masterpiece, a gem of contemporary animation—a pioneering and singular work, both in word and in form—exquisitely world-building, yet rooted in what is intimate and everyday.

The initial idea already carries an infectious power. We step into the frame of an unfinished painting. The painter has mysteriously disappeared, leaving many places and characters colorless. This has profound consequences for the inhabitants of the painted world. A class division has emerged among them: the “Finished,” the “Unfinished,” and the “Sketches.” The first group resides in a vast, gilded castle, reveling in banquets. The second and third groups are barred from entry, deemed unworthy and inferior. There is no place for them in the representative painting—especially since the characters are aware of who they are and what they are part of. They therefore live in the forest, cloaked in shadow and filled with shame. This is not how their lives were meant to be.

But the Finished have it their way. Accustomed to exclusive comfort, they have no intention of giving up their pleasant sense of superiority. Yet the status quo cannot last forever. There are countless potential triggers for the escalation of conflict. To set it in motion, Laguionie reaches for a dramatic formula of the finest pedigree: Shakespearean tragedy—Romeo and Juliet. This is merely the point of departure and the only familiar narrative pattern in The Painting. From there, the director ventures into ever more distant, unexplored cinematic territories.

The Finished Ramo loves the Unfinished Claire. The lovers meet in secret, hoping for a miracle and dreaming of a colorful—if, for now, unreal—future. When Claire is kidnapped, Ramo has no choice but to embark on a desperate mission. The painter must be found! Though no one knows how or where to look for him. In this dimension, or another? The viewer must muster considerable resistance not to follow Ramo’s journey. Meanwhile, the grass-blade-delicate Sketch Plume and the curious Lola—unfinished at the hem of her dress—have nothing to lose. They go with Ramo. Their curiosity and courage can only be rewarded.

Brimming with creative invention, the first act heralds a journey into the unknown (and more than one horizon will be crossed), employs intriguing symbols (it is Claire’s face that remains unfinished), and presents a world that, though initially vivid and legible, is riddled with mysteries and question marks.

Ramo, Lola, and Plume reach the frame and leap into the painting hanging below. There, two armies wage an endless battle, forcing them to flee onward. They land in the painter’s abandoned studio, where an artist’s self-portrait regards them cautiously and with suspicion. A nude woman in a painting turns to them with greater warmth. This is only a telegraphic sketch of the film’s narrative solutions and proposed perspectives. Each has a second and third layer—second and third doors opening onto new worlds.

This is not a hastily assembled collage, but a coherent and consistent narrative. A thought-provoking reflection on the medium, free of banality and pretension. An attempt to grasp the bond that forms between creator and material—if such a bond exists at all—since Laguionie prefers asking questions to supplying definitive answers. The film’s formal complexity works wonderfully on a visual level, but above all it carries an immense density of meaning, growing with each scene at a truly geometric rate.

One strand is contemplation of the status of the artwork itself—how independently it functions, and how much in relation to its creator. Another is that within The Painting we find clues that invite readings on the plane of faith or metaphysics (do Ramo, Lola, and Plume not seek the Creator?), and/or lend the film the character of an epistemological parable.

Though steeped in surrealism, The Painting ultimately comments on our here and now—on a moment when the boundary between actual reality and increasingly insistent virtual, artificial worlds is rapidly eroding. It is precisely this mood that the film’s ironic, understated final note strikes. This is how animated masterpieces are painted.