Before production started on his guilelessly charming biopic “Hilma,” about the mystical artist Hilma af Klint, the Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom insisted on a séance to meet his subject. The painter, who died in 1944, believed that spirits guided her to create symbols which, when mounted together, would illustrate an energy map of the universe.
In her lifetime, af Klint was seen as a kook — and her occult work was barely seen at all. Before she died, she stipulated that her paintings remain hidden for another two decades. Though she was painting abstract canvases before Wassily Kandinsky or Piet Mondrian, af Klint’s eye-popping color combinations didn’t emerge until the moment Mary Quant could have slapped them on a minidress.
“Hilma” likewise gets off to a rough start. Hallstrom’s script is inked in simplistic lines. It’s a humorless caricature of period-piece conventions, complete with heavy-handed depictions of sexism — “That girl, she paints — paints!” The classic telltale cough of doom arrives courtesy of her younger sister Hermina (Emmi Tjernstrom), whose death kick-starts the artist’s fixation on the great beyond.
Yet, Hallstrom wins the audience back with his sincere connection to af Klint, played in her bullheaded youth by his daughter, Tora Hallstrom, and in her muttering years by his wife, Lena Olin. He and the cinematographer Ragna Jorming challenge themselves to see through af Klint’s eyes, animating her overpowering images of spirals and lines until they swirl around her body. Some visual experiments work, like lingering shots of a raspberry’s geometry or a flayed horse’s veins. Others are merely odd, like when he intermittently manipulates footage to look like an early silent film.
What emerges is a softly supernatural story about a futurist who behaved as selfishly as any retrograde male genius. The narrative thrust comes from af Klint’s insensitivity toward her fellow female artists in the theosophic collective, The Five, particularly her lover and patron, Anna Cassel (Catherine Chalk). Hallstrom credits that insight to his beyond-the-grave conversation with af Klimt. Believe him or not, the emotions onscreen have true power.
Hilma
Not rated. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.
