Andree Heuschling — she was called DeeDee — was in search of fame and fortune. But she'd never heard of Renoir.
"She didn't know nothing about the painting, the painter, who was famous or not at this moment," Bourdos says.
In the film, DeeDee is sent to visit Renoir by his wife, Aline. The artist's son Jean says it was his mother's last gift to her husband. But Bourdos says there's another story about how DeeDee got there.
"She shows up one time to see Matisse, and he said, 'You are not a Matisse; you are a Renoir.' "
Sure enough, she became Renoir's last model. Pearly rose and serene on his canvases, DeeDee registers in the film as a wild girl — determined, forceful.
"She was a kind of tornado," Bourdos says. "Full of energy and a little bit lunatic. A lunatic? Yeah, yeah."
Renoir liked that: a person who knew who she was. The painter had his own demons. He could be cold. Aloof.
"To paint or create, to write, to make music — you need huge concentration," Bourdos says. "It's not an easy work. People think because you are painting flowers, children, nudes, it's an easy job. It's not at all."
Once DeeDee arrived, Bourdos says, the distracted, sad, crippled artist began coming out of himself.
"She came, and he found again a new energy to create," the director says. "That's the whole point of the story. He didn't just start to paint again. He started to paint nudes again."
"What interests me is skin," Renoir says — "the velvety texture of a young girl's skin." (Much of the film's dialogue comes from his son Jean's memoir of his father.)
"That's pretty sexy," Bourdos says. "Not just a painter saying that. It's a man. It's true for a filmmaker too."
A Bridge Between One Art And Another
And it was true for son Jean Renoir, who fell in love with DeeDee. He'd been struggling with a lack of motivation; she pushed him to make something of himself. They married. Jean Renoir became a major filmmaker and put DeeDee in some of his movies. The beautiful, wild redhead was a lover to the son and a muse to the father.
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