It is a truth universally acknowledged that a lot of the greatest artists of our time were dealing with mental health issues. It is a further truth that these mental illnesses are handled are not always handled well in film biopics. This can be even more sensitive when the artist is a woman. Sometimes the illness is seen as the cause of the art, sometimes it’s seen as the reason the art stopped. Sometimes it’s implied the mental illness was caused by abuse suffered in childhood, other times a person is just unlucky. But what seems to be happening a bit more these days is that the struggle with the mental health and the artistic achievements are not seen as separate and unrelated things, but just stuff that happens over the course of a long life. The ways in which Leonora in the Morning Light handles the bigger issues in the life of Leonora Carrington – surrealist, painter, partner, mother and wife, among other things – aren’t always smooth. But as a portrait of a woman working mightily to find her own safe harbour in an unforgiving world, the glimpses here are just delightful.
The timings slip back and forth, but the movie begins and ends in Mexico in the early 1950s, where the English Leonora (Olivia Vinall) is married to the Hungarian Chiki (István Téglás), mother to a small boy, and struggling badly. Long story short, her experiences of the second world war finally caught up with her. Before the war she was the lover of fellow painter Max Ernst (Alexander Scheer) living and working together happily in the south of France as they wait for his divorce to come through. The movie is named after one of his paintings of her. But the beginning of the war causes several things to go wrong, and Leonora ends up in a mental hospital in Spain, having to navigate the unfriendly system in her third language, alone. It is something of a mistake by writer-directors Thor Klein and Lena Vurma, who adapted the novel by Elena Poniatowska, not to show us how Leonora ended up in Mexico and made her choice of husband after this. But what they are more interested in doing is showing how Leonora’s experiences in France and Spain, combined with childhood memories of England and her adult life in Mexico, combined into her unusual, strange, vivid art.
Many scenes were filmed in Las Pozas, a surrealistic kind of sculpture garden near Xilitla, which was constructed by Edward James (Ryan Gage). It’s a place of such strange and surpassing beauty that it feels like an unfinished dream – cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru must have been thrilled. Adrian Lo’s sound design also uses echoes of the noises of the jungles, animals and birds, throughout the film to echo Leonora’s mental state. It’s all beautifully off-kilter, but Ms. Vinall maintains an air of elegant composure even when things are bad indeed. It’s clear her Leonora has never quite found solid footing in her life, with the possible exception of her time with Max, but the ways she expresses those disturbances in her art clearly helps ease her suffering. The coda at the end refers to Ms. Carrington as leading ‘a stable and fulfilling life’ and how the importance of her work is being ‘increasingly recognised.’ Neither of those things can be taken for granted so this is a reassuring note on which to end the film.
But Leonora in the Morning Light is the story of the artist before she became an artist. It’s the thoughts, steps, experiences and false starts she had to take before finding her own path. These stories are never not fascinating, especially when the life is as complex and interesting as this one. The importance of the garden worker named Ximena (Yoshira Escarrega), who wears a jade pendant for protection and sings deeply moving songs about death, is the kind of encounter on which a whole life can sometimes twist. But Ximena’s kindness and her ability to understand Leonora’s sometimes confused stories is precisely what unlocks something good inside of her. Another act of great kindness was done in France by her friend Remedios (Cassandra Ciangherotti), without which there might not be a story here to tell. You can never understand a whole person from just one brief glimpse of them, but what we see here in Leonora in the Morning Light is a gorgeous peek indeed.
Leonora in the Morning Light is now in limited theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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