The film is by Céline Sallette, who until then we knew as an actress: it is her first feature film, dedicated to a very important figure in twentieth century art, the Franco-American Niki de Saint Phalle. It therefore tackles a formidable form in cinema: the biographical film, or biopic as they say, and what is more, the artist biopic – a thousand pitfalls therefore, the soberly titled film Nikidoes rather well, despite some explanatory excesses.
When the film begins, Niki, who is not yet called de Saint Phalle, poses as a fashion model: it is a still shot. We see his face and the top of his bust, hands busy arranging clothes, hair, makeup, then a male voice off-camera, that of the photographer, barks orders: Niki is first of all a object, acted by men, acted by artists other than herself. This scene is a sort of theoretical springboard for the film which intends to do the opposite: to show Niki as a subject, and as a subject of her own artistic emancipation. For the moment, she lives a bohemian existence with her husband, a writer, who paints in his spare time, which is few in number, because she is already the mother of a little girl, and above all because she suffers from paranoid and depressive attacks which cause her to to be interned in a clinic. It was there that she became, according to her own words, an artist, and upon leaving she began to paint seriously, and to meet Tinguely, Arman, the whole group of future New Realists.
The film manages to intertwine without opposing Niki’s life as an artist and her life as a wife and mother, whose coexistence does not go without conflict, and to show what it is to be a woman artist at a period and in a field where they were an ultra-minority. The film here avoids overly demonstrative synthesis, remaining very close to its subject: Niki is in every aspect, and represents nothing other than herself. This is due to the performance of Charlotte Le Bon who plays the title role and who manages to portray a truly singular female figure, because she is both very beautiful, sophisticated, but also a little awkward, sometimes with a burlesque silhouette: a strange figure, constantly on the verge of crisis – which maintains the spectator’s interest even beyond the frame of reference. Whether it is Niki de Saint Phalle, in the end, often matters less than it is a good character: often the biopic is all the better as the character emancipates himself from his source – I am thinking in the genre of Van Gogh of Pialat.
Living art
The film chooses a first period, that of apprenticeship: when Niki paints, then begins to assemble objects into sculptures, and finally presents in 1960 her first performance painting entitled “Shooting”, where she shoots with a gun. rifle on a painting representing a male figure to which she has attached colored pockets. But above all he chooses not to show her work: we do not see her painting when she works at home, nor her installations at the hospital, nor the painting on which she draws: all of her plastic production remains off-camera, including when a gallery director comes to observe his work, and we are only allowed to see the backs of the paintings. Frank choice on the part of the director, a little excessively demonstrative at times, but not uninteresting, and which allows us to avoid these often catastrophic scenes of the kind where an actor from behind pretends to put a final brushstroke on a reproduction – I recently thought of a film about Bonnard, which ticked all the boxes of the heavy portrait of an artist at work. A way of avoiding freezing the portrait in agreed and artificial correspondences between art and life, by removing Niki’s art from a heritage reproduced on the screen, and by showing it as a living practice.
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