In her last two lead performances, Brussels-born Yolande Moreau has shown exceptional nuance and grace in roles that could have easily toppled lesser actresses. When the Sea Rises (2004), which Moreau also co-wrote and co-directed, starts with an unconventional premise—a performance artist traveling with her bizarre one-woman show begins a tentative relationship with a man who makes giant papier-mâché puppets—and becomes one of the sweetest, most original road-romance movies in recent years. As the title character in Martin Provost’s Séraphine, a real-life naïve artist who died in an insane asylum in 1942, Moreau is unforgettable, courageously forgoing the histrionics usually associated with biopics about the mentally disturbed. Séraphine, the housekeeper of a German collector, Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), who championed her work in the ’20s and ’30s, may answer to the voice of her guardian angel when it commands her to paint and commune with trees, but she also responds quite avidly to the siren call of cash, reveling in the opportunity to splurge once Uhde has sold a few of her works. Moreau plays the painter as no one’s fool, and, in several scenes marked by silence, conveys Séraphine’s mental state as utterly inscrutable.