Le Ninfee di Monet
Un incantesimo di acqua e di luce
The event film dedicated to the father of Impressionism and his obsession with water lilies.
When former French Prime Minister George Clemenceau travels to Giverny, he finds several canvases piled up in the cellar of the rich house where he is a guest. Numerous represent exotic flowers, presented for the first time at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889. The garden, the pond, the paintings that make that house unique among all are his works: by Claude Monet, the father of Impressionism. And those flowers with fleshy petals, which float on the surface of the water and extend their roots in the swampy waters, are nénuphar, but for Monet they will always and only be Nymphéas, water lilies.
It is precisely to tell this story, this passion, this obsession, that Monet’s water lilies arrives at the cinema. A spell of water and light, the event film produced by Ballandi Arts and Nexo Digital that have been in theaters only for three days on November 26th, 27th and 28th, 2019 and had taken the public to Paris, including the Musée Marmottan, the Musée de l ‘Orangerie and the Musée D’Orsay, in Giverny with the Fondation Monet, the artist’s house and garden, and among the magnificent panoramas of Étretat. Elisa Lasowski (Game of Thrones and Versailles) guides the spectators to discover the places, works and events of the master, while the scientific advice has been entrusted to the historian and writer Ross King, author of the best seller ‘The mystery of the water lilies. Monet and the revolution of modern painting’, published in Italy by Rizzoli.
Other precious interventions that shed new light on the figure of Monet and his work include that of the Flemish photographer Sanne De Wilde and that of the gardener of the Fondation Monet, Claire Hélène Marron. The original soundtrack of the film is signed by Remo Anzovino.
Through all these voices and sounds, we discover how Claude Monet emerges from the depression that led him to abandon painting and decide to devote himself body and soul to his most colossal enterprise: the Grand Décoration. Huge panels depicting his pond of water lilies, so enveloping that the viewer’s gaze is lost in an atmosphere of serenity and peace.
Following the route of the Seine, we start from Le Havre where Monet spends the first period of his artistic life, going up the river to the other countries where he lived, to demonstrate how innovative, radical and modern his approach to art is and how spasmodic his search for the aquatic element: Poissy, Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Giverny. Here, imprisoned in his garden, while the bombs of the First World War rain down, Monet obsessively pursues his dream of eternal glory, and painstakingly paints his work of resistance and peace. In Paris, in the Musée de L’Orangerie, his hope finally finds the right fulfillment, in the magnificent oval rooms he designed himself. Here, in May 1927, his friend George Clemenceau finally inaugurated the museum dedicated to the Grand Décoration.
But Claude Monet died just five months earlier. He will never see his work done, nor will he know the impact it has had on the public. But Monet’s most daring work, the one in which he spent the last twelve years of his life and his last energies, is received with contempt by the French. Only thirty years later, Monet’s Water Lilies will cross a larger pond, the Atlantic Ocean, and invade the United States, along with all of his production, thus decreeing – this time forever – the success of an extraordinary genius.