Senlis, 1914. A middle-aged cleaning lady spends her spare time harvesting plants and river reeds, stealing blood from the local butcher and candle oil from the church. No prior knowledge of the subject matter of this beautiful, old-fashioned (in the very best sense) European arthouse film might lead one to wonder what on earth is going on – but when you realise this is the story of French ‘naïve’ artist Séraphine Louis (aka Séraphine de Senlis), it all falls into place. She is gathering the raw ingredients to make paint. This is no ordinary biopic. There is no one defining childhood incident from which all else flows. In fact, the artist is already aged 50 as the film begins. She is completely devoted to the process of expressing herself through her art, and to the 'guardian angel' whose instructions she claims she is merely following. When not communing with nature in pursuit of the means by which to paint – or earning the money, by whatever means possible, to buy things she cannot scavenge – she is painting by candlelight, long into the night. But, as chance would have it, German art critic and collector, Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), takes up residence in the house she cleans and discovers one of her paintings, so setting in motion a long association between artist and patron. It’s this relationship that forms the spine of the film – interrupted, albeit, by World War I – though the feature as a whole ultimately belongs to Yolande Moreau as Séraphine. The artist’s inexorable slide from obsessive, eccentric ‘savant’ into a deeper insanity brings out a performance as good as any you’ll see this year. That Martin Provost’s elegant film was the big winner at this year’s Césars is little surprise, and Séraphine’s beloved countryside is perfectly captured by Laurent Brunet’s stunning, landscape-painterly cinematography – worthy of the artist’s own richly-fantasised floral paintings themselves.