While other Impressionists were painting ballerinas and Parisians socialites, Vincent van Gogh was sanctifying the simple lives of peasants. Now imagine if one of van Gogh's potato eaters picked up a brush and showed us the world through her eyes. Such a woman was Seraphine de Senlis, a cleaning lady and self-taught painter whose work was nurtured by the dealer who popularized Picasso.

"Seraphine," winner of the French award for best picture, is rare in its sympathetic focus on a laborer, yet refined in its execution.

It's hard to imagine Hollywood casting an actress like Yolane Moreau in a lead role. She is fleshy and 50-ish, and her Seraphine is the embodiment of lumpen drudgery. Yet while she's bent low scrubbing the floors, her heart is lifted skyward to a naturalistic Creator.

When Seraphine can steal a free moment, she talks to the trees, bathes nude in a stream and picks berries. She mixes those berries with blood and candle wax to make pigments for the landscapes she secretly paints in her room.

When her secret is discovered, Seraphine tells her employer that a guardian angel instructed the humble servant to glorify God through art. One of her hallucinatory paintings is spotted by art dealer Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur).

Uhde sees a kinship to another of his discoveries, the primitivist Henri Rousseu. But before Uhde can introduce Serpahine to collectors, the first World War erupts.

A decade later, fortune reunites Uhde with Seraphine. Suddenly rewarded for her years of devotion, Seraphine quits her job and lives the life of a lottery winner. But God has another plan for her.

With exquisitely simple images and minimal dialogue, "Seraphine" is both haunting and humane.

Even in the sorrowful finale, the eyes of this woman shine with an unspeakable joy and a hint of mischief.