Seraphine’s first scene of a woman’s hand stirring a dark river, with currents and life underneath, evokes Jonathan Demme’s 1998 Beloved. It’s successfully mysterious and imagistic—befitting a movie about a female painter whose early 20th-century floral paintings evoked a wild, innocent intimacy with nature. Though it’s close to how Demme interpreted the sensuality of Toni Morrison’s slavery tale, Seraphine doesn’t proceed to the psychic, spiritual depths of Beloved. Writer-director Martin Provost tastefully martyrs Seraphine de Senlis (née Louis) but ultimately neglects the psychic intimacy that made Beloved great cinema.

Provost lets refined distance substitute for expressing Seraphine’s naive Catholicism and suppressed femininity. She toils as a cook and washerwoman, painting on wood panels in a style that goes unnoticed until one of her client’s tenants, German art critic Wilhelm Uhde, notices her native talent. Uhde had discovered Henri Rousseau, the most famous of French painting’s naifs. “I prefer the term Modern Primitives to naifs,” Uhde declared, and Provost takes that literally, with Yolande Moreau’s performance as middle-aged Seraphine. Director and star emphasize Seraphine’s imposing yet stooped bulk; her thick wrists and fingers as she scrubs; her bare feet when she paints. She’ll climb a tree to sit in its limbs and look up at the wind rustling its branches.

These scenes, like the introduction of Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) observing a perfect Impressionist vista of a bridge over a stream, have definite painterly appreciation. But this makes for prosaic cinema (delicately shot by Laurent Brunet).The best sequence has shy Seraphine acquiring the confidence to show her new work to neighbors: Provost edits each canvas to an unpredictable reaction shot. A woman comments, “Your flowers look like insects, like torn flesh.” And Seraphine: “What I’ve done scares me.”

It may seem easy to say that Seraphine’s one flaw is that—unlike Demme’s Beloved—it doesn’t feel like insects or torn flesh.Yet, that kind of emotional power is what’s missing from this standard narrative.While respecting the class disadvantages suffered by poor, single, uneducated women (and implying similar obstacles for Uhde, her gay benefactor), Provost neglects Seraphine’s beliefs and the riskiness of her mental instability—both could explain her artistry. Instead, he duly proceeds to her eventual institutionalization.

Moreau didn’t need a mad scene; it nearly turns her canny performance into cliché. Her actresses’ tension, like Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple, avoids mawkishness. Moreau flashes Seraphine’s fierce shrewdness and abandonment to her work. Still, this biopic lacks revelation coming, as it does, after Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments, which showed the quotidian richness of a female artist discovering her personality. Next to Demme’s expressionism and Troell’s realism, Provost’s good film is banal.