Two Flemish peasant women walk on a country path at sunset, amiably chatting, probably heading home after a day of work. We follow their cheerful strolling for a while until the silhouette of a top-hatted man grabs our attention from the background. He is sketching in a notebook. Of course, we know who he is. It’s a striking opening shot, yet not as defining as we’ll get to realise in retrospect, while the film unfolds.
Something extremely exciting or terribly dull typically comes from art recounting itself. To treat someone like JMW Turner as an extraordinary man—when extraordinary is indeed what he was—would have been tempting, if anything. But Mike Leigh does things differently, taking us down a far more fascinating route. Avoiding to fall into the facile celebrative clichés of the genre, he reminds us that genius is nothing but the result of extraordinary efforts made by very ordinary human beings. His Turner gropes maids, disavows children, and grunts like a pig, but he is essentially as bad or good as any creature on this bloody earth.
The amber perfection of Mr. Turner’s photography had initially put me off. Its relentless golden hour lights are arguably unlikely, all the more in Chelsea and Margate. Then it occurred to me that such a cinematographic obstinacy couldn’t be just a rootless aesthetic choice, but maybe an attempt at filtering the world through the voracious gaze of a man in love with the romantic violence of colours. ‘Colour is contradictory,’ says Turner to Mrs Somerville with piercing eyes. His art is ferociously passionate, so the palette of Mr. Turner—the film—or so it is as maybe.
Although not being one of my favourite Mike Leigh’s films, Mr. Turner does leave me with the vivid memory of some really superb moments. The way it ends for instance, those last two shots on the most important women in the artist’s adult life—again, so contrasting and yet somewhat complementary—really are the touch of a master.
