Niki (2024) by Céline Sallette: Art as Refuge, Silence to Roar
- dailyentertainment95
- Aug 21
- 4 min read
Short Summary: From Conformity to Creative Rebellion
Set in Paris, 1952—Niki de Saint Phalle has fled New York for Europe with her husband and young daughter, hoping to escape suffocating expectations. Yet corrupt memories of childhood abuse persist, haunting her until she discovers painting as a radical act of transformation. Art becomes her voice, weapon, and escape from patriarchal confines.
Link IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26656556/
About movie: https://www.pulsarcontent.com/niki
Link to watch: https://www.justwatch.com/fr/film/niki (France)
Detailed Summary: Breaking Free Through Brushstrokes
Escape and Disquiet
Paris offers Niki freedom from New York’s rigid codes, but the weight of her past does not fade. She struggles to fit into the role of a wife and mother while fighting inner turmoil that refuses to be ignored.
Fragmented Self
The film uses flashbacks and fragmented imagery to reveal her childhood trauma. These intrusions disrupt the domestic veneer of calm, showing the fracture between her outer world and inner wounds.
Institutional Collapse
When Niki’s instability emerges too visibly, she is institutionalized and subjected to harsh treatments, including electroshock therapy. In this space of suffering, she first turns to painting, channeling chaos into creation.
From Model to Maker
Once dismissed as simply beautiful, Niki reclaims her body and mind through art. The film traces her departure from passive roles into active creation, marking the beginning of her artistic and personal rebirth.
A Feminist Awakening
With support from artists such as Jean Tinguely, she steps into the avant-garde movement, transforming her pain into radical artworks that question femininity, violence, and liberation.
Director’s Vision: Reframing the Invisible Heroine
Poetic, Not Procedural
Sallette rejects the conventional biopic formula. Instead of chronology, she chooses a dreamlike structure—emotions and memory take precedence over linear storytelling.
The Art Without the Art
Since the film could not show de Saint Phalle’s actual artworks, Sallette compensates by framing Le Bon’s face, gestures, and silences as living works of art. Her body becomes the gallery of Niki’s emotions.
An Intimate Method
Filmed with small crews and improvised energy, the production itself mirrors Niki’s artistic rebellion—messy, impulsive, but alive with spirit.
Themes: Resilience, Selfhood, and the Cost of Reclamation
Survival Becomes Creation
Niki transforms suffering into art. The film shows how personal trauma can become a universal language of rebellion.
Identity as Rebirth
She sheds her inherited titles—wife, aristocrat, model—to claim a new identity, self-fashioned and uncompromising.
Feminist Struggle in Male Spaces
The story highlights the tension of being a woman in a patriarchal art scene. Her refusal to be silenced echoes across every frame.
Key Success Factors: What Makes Niki Resonate
Charlotte Le Bon’s Immersive Performance
Le Bon plays Niki with vulnerability and strength, embodying a woman who is constantly in flux yet anchored in resilience.
Cinematographic Intensity
Victor Seguin’s camera captures both intimate close-ups and grand symbolic compositions, enveloping the viewer in Niki’s psyche.
Reinventing the Biopic
Instead of focusing on achievements, the film dives into becoming—the messy, emotional, and unfinished process of reclaiming life.
Awards & Festival Reception: From Cannes to Consensus
Premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2024, Niki was met with admiration for its boldness and nominated for the Caméra d'Or as a standout debut. Though divisive in its artistic liberties, it was celebrated as a strong feminist reimagining of the artist biopic.
Critics Reception: Compelling Yet Cautious
Variety praised Le Bon’s performance as electric and unflinching, though noted that the film could have taken even greater risks to match Niki’s radicalism.
Screen Daily emphasized the rawness of the emotional journey, applauding its visual style and fragmented storytelling.
Cineuropa described it as evocative but uneven, with moments of brilliance offset by occasional narrative hesitations.
French press lauded Sallette’s courage as a debut director, noting the film’s empathy and formal experimentation.
Overall: Critics admired its beauty, intensity, and lead performance, while acknowledging that its restraint sometimes softened the impact of its daring subject.
Reviews: Viewers’ Emotional Spark
Viewers on festival circuits praised its theatrical boldness, with many calling it an “emotional exorcism” on screen.
Others were struck by how the absence of Niki’s actual works forced the audience to focus entirely on her inner journey.
Some found it challenging and opaque, but agreed that it captured a truth beyond biography: the becoming of an artist.
Why to Recommend Film: Silence That Sings
An Emotional Biopic Like No Other: It avoids predictable storytelling and instead inhabits the artist’s fragmented mind.
Feminist Power: A film about a woman reclaiming her voice in a world determined to silence her.
Cinematic Experimentation: Bold visuals and sound design create a deeply immersive sensory experience.
Movie Trend: Biopics as Embodied Allegory
Niki belongs to a new trend of biopics that avoid rigid narratives and instead focus on internal life—turning biography into allegory. It follows the path of films like Spencer or I’m Not There, where the subject is evoked rather than explained.
Social Trend: Art Born from Silenced Trauma
The film echoes contemporary social discussions on trauma, survival, and how art becomes a tool for reclaiming power. In a moment when silenced stories are being revisited and voiced, Niki feels both timely and necessary.
Final Verdict: Portrait of Becoming
Niki is not a film about the artworks themselves but about the emergence of the artist. It is raw, poetic, and unsettling, with Charlotte Le Bon anchoring one of her most powerful roles. Céline Sallette succeeds in transforming Niki de Saint Phalle’s journey into a universal cry of liberation—a cinematic portrait of a woman who turned silence into art and pain into revolution.
Comments