Over the past few years, it’s been noticeable that historical dramas and prestige pictures have suddenly become more interesting, as the window on what’s classified as “historical” has shifted, and more deserving figures have elbowed their way into accounts of the past. An individual like Mexican-British artist Leonora Carrington is now seen as the exemplar of early-20th-century Surrealism, with the biographical exploration Leonora in the Morning Light seeking to explain the key inspirations of her work, with her name and legend rising in recent years, despite her paintings’ inconsistent circulation in galleries. Premiering in Europe late last month at Filmfest Münich after an initial bow at Guadalajara, the film was co-written and directed by German duo Thor Klein and Lena Vurma, continuing in the mode of the former’s Adventures of a Mathematician [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], quite a conventional and pedagogic film on the Polish émigré scientist Stan Ulam.

Like many stories of great artists (and the premier biographical films on them, such as Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch and Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh), in Leonora in the Morning Light, we’re presented with a unique array of factors and turbulent life circumstances that helped bring Carrington’s art into being, creating an alchemical mix with her raw talent. Upper-class life in windy, grey Lancashire wasn’t the ticket for the ambitious young artist (played convincingly over three decades of her life by newcomer Olivia Vinall), so she decamped to Paris in the 1920s, where she rubbed shoulders with Max Ernst (played by Alexander Scheer), who would become her lover and primary mentor, and gave the movement founder André Breton (Denis Eyriey) the evil eye at a salon, where he was holding court on the Femme enfant figure required to be the muse of every great Surrealist.

Whilst Klein and Vurma’s work easily rises above something made for TV, they sacrifice much depth by efficiently leapfrogging across key events from Carrington’s life. Those aforementioned films on artists don’t forget to be works of art in themselves, their pacing mimicking the patience and painstaking work required to make art; Klein and Vurma rightfully assert their subject’s international pedigree, eclectic influences and resilient mental health despite extreme duress (due to her displacement as World War II began, and the schizophrenic traits of hearing voices and seeing visions, which she was eventually able to surmount), but the detail they’re expressed through is too broad and glancing, and the declamatory and on-the-nose nature of the dialogue doesn’t help.

Like William S Burroughs as seen in last year’s Queer [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], the particular aura of Mexico City – where she emigrated in 1942, although the film picks up her life there in 1951 – properly furnished her ability to become an authentic Surrealist, although wholly on her own terms; the original generation in Paris were directly influenced by Freud and his original model of the unconscious, whilst Carrington built upon Meso-American indigenous traditions, various fables and folklore from the British Isles, and the animism of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As Carrington dreams of her strict upper-class father being gutted by wild beasts in the family drawing room, and rabbits and horses in the outer-Mexican forests call to her, we realise that Klein and Vurma have successfully collated the intellectual mood board of her life for us: a dense collage of referents auguring belatedly appreciated work, putting her place in the previously male-dominated art canon beyond doubt.

Leonora in the Morning Light is a co-production by Germany, Mexico, the UK and Romania, staged by Dragonfly Films, Meli Melo, Randan, Framebreed and Ostlicht Filmproduktion. Its world sales are overseen by Indie Sales.