The post-impressionist painter’s first trip to French Polynesia in 1891 is the focus of this lush, semi-fictionalized biographical exploration of art and inspiration. Flush with the idea of new freedoms, Henri Gauguin (a magnetic Vincent Cassel) abandons his family and a drab Paris and sets off for Tahiti. There, he discovers both inspiration and uncertainly in Tehura, a younger islander who consents to his advances when her parents offer her to the artist as a wife.
