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A Painter, A Novelist And A Contentious Lifelong Friendship: 'Cézanne et Moi'

It'll help to brush up on your Impressionists before seeing writer-director Danièle Thompson's decades-spanning portrait of Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne, but the film deftly avoids biopic clichés.
A Study In Contrasts: Emile Zola (Guillaume Canet) and Paul Cézanne (Guillaume Gallienne) in <em>Cézanne et Moi</em>.

Cézanne et Moi opens with one of the most difficult things to depict on screen: the inner toil of an artist at work. Yet the first character to appear is not painter Paul Cezanne but the movie's "moi": novelist Emile Zola, a friend of Cézanne for most of his life.

Aside from being historically authentic, the

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