I return to the cracked mug of the previous post, my circus totem now hanging in the kitchen, and into my head pops one of the anthems of Madeleine Peyroux (lifting Leonard Cohen lyrics) and all that jazz: There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. An artist who embodies that is Leonora Carrington, 1917 to 2011, as I found out on Thursday night in the luminous portrayal by Olivia Vinall in Thor Klein and Lena Vurma's beautiful film Leonora in the Morning Light.
Now I am going to ask a favour. If you have not seen the film and there is any possibility you might, please STOP READING now and come back another time. There will not be spoilers as such, for this is a thank-you letter, a response rather than a review, but I knew nothing about the film, or the painter, before going, and being a blank canvas was the greatest gift. It was such a special evening. I hope you get to experience the same.
The film is adapted from Elena Poniatowska's novel Leonora, written by la Reina de México herself, a literary queen and long-time friend of Leonora Carrington, and perhaps that is why it feels less like a neat biopic than a spell-cast portrait, fragmented, sensuous and guided by image as much as incident.
And so to the eponymous heroine. The English artist who unleashed her free spirit in France in a tumultuous affair with Max Ernst, for which she became known as the Bride of the Wind, and lived out her years in Mexico, dying there in 2011 at the age of 94. I was aware of her name, as it is shared with my goddaughter, for whom I always keep an eye out. But while I had been a long-time fan of the surrealist movement ever since studying it at university, Leonora Carrington had not properly come onto my radar until the synchronicity of Instagram algorithms announced there was a London premiere of a biopic about her at the Institut Français' Ciné Lumière.
The title of the film alone was enough of a siren call. Carolyn was instantly on board. She runs an art gallery and is far more knowledgeable than me. And then our friend Jo, a fellow languages teacher, secured the very last ticket. Some things are meant to be.
There is something magical about the number three, and the spell took hold as we met at our local station, unperturbed by the delay of the train, which allowed us to soak up the evening sun and catch up. Taking time to arrive at a destination can be its own reward.
We stepped into the threshold of France woven through with a Mexican crowd, signalled by a very stylish woman with a beautiful fan chatting in the foyer, who I later realised was the Mexican ambassador's wife. At the bar, a sardonic eyebrow was raised with Gallic charm at the question posed, alongside the order for three glasses of rosé.
"Do we have ice? Mais bien sûr!"
I rather love the bonhomie at the Institut, where they are so used to francophiles keen to practise their French and happily slip into banter. Even better, having arrived with a mintue until curtain up, we could take our glasses straight in without decanting into plastic. So civilised. We took our seats just as Thor Klein stepped forward to introduce the film with the simplest of instructions: "Feel it, don't think too much."
The natural beauty of Mexico and France became the backdrop to a portrait of a visionary ahead of her time. As we would later learn in the Q&A, hosted by film critic Anna Smith of the Girls on Film podcast, one of their first stops in Mexico had been the garden of Edward James, Las Pozas, an overwhelming place where you feel you are standing inside a painting. "We were standing in a liquid painting," Thor said, "and that became the starting point for how to shoot the film, using only the colour palette that Leonora herself used."
Resistant to societal norms, I love the fact that a woman with a love of horses and talking animals, how very Giffords, would end up in Mexico, where magical reality is simply what keeps the world turning. The horse was a guardian motif throughout her work, an identity she associated with herself alongside the hyena. Ever since reading Carlos Castaneda in my sixth form common room, I have been intrigued by the notion of a quest guided by a spirit animal. But move over The Way of Don Juan. I am now bewitched by El Camino de Doña Leonora.
The journey takes us, not necessarily in chronological order, from childhood flashbacks to Leonora's brief interlude in Paris, her affair with Max Ernst in the Ardèche, her flight into Spain and the sanatorium in Santander, where the brutal regime of shock treatment and medication is harrowing to watch. The scenes are rooted in the trauma she would later write about in Down Below, and they are almost unbearable. During her breakdown in Santander she wrote: "I felt that, through the power of the Sun, I was an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Spirit, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman." It is a sentence that contains multitudes.
It is worth knowing that right now, until 10 August 2026, the Freud Museum in London is showing The Symptomatic Surreal, the first institutional exhibition dedicated to Carrington's drawings from her Santander sketchbooks, placing her recurring motifs of horses and the underworld in dialogue with Freud's own collection of antiquities. The exhibition is anchored by Down Below, 1940, the seminal painting produced during her hospitalisation, on show in London for the first time. A companion painting, Villa Pilar, joins the exhibition from 1 July. If the film opens a door, the Freud Museum takes you through it.
Throughout the film, the animal world speaks to Leonora in ways others cannot hear. In Paris, a fox acts as threshold creature, foreshadowing the hyena to come. In the Ardèche, a Cheshire-cat voice functions as an alter-ego, observing from just off camera. And in Mexico, a monkey chatters at her side, while the hyena, having performed a breakthrough act in a childhood memory unlocked in the sanatorium, leads her to a sacred burial site.
It is in Mexico too that she finds her great friend and fellow artist Remedios Varo, with whom she shares a passionate interest in the occult, alchemy, Gnostic doctrines and ancient Celtic mythology, the same tradition Leonora had absorbed from her Irish mother as a child. Their friendship becomes one of the film's beating hearts. As foretold by the cards Remedios draws, Leonora is moving towards a new life.
Mexico is also fitting because it is a culture where death is very much part of the everyday, as in one of my all-time favourite novels, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. Thor in the Q&A described how he was fascinated by the very different relationship with death that Mexicans have compared with Europeans. For them, it is an everyday topic, metaphysical and present, lived in the open. Leonora, he said, was quite afraid of death, and while in Europe it may happen behind closed doors, in Mexico, facing it became part of her liberation.
Leonora strikes me as une femme savante, and perhaps this is why she bristles against the surrealist enthusiasm for the ultimate female muse, la femme enfant, and quickly sets Breton straight when he tries to box her into that category in Paris. You may put us on a pedestal, but we are still the ones having to change the sheets, she effectively points out. It reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir decrying endless housework as more tedious than the task of Sisyphus. What the film touches on only briefly, and what I have since discovered with some wonder, is that this same fierce energy drove her to become a co-founder of the Mexican Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s. The femme savante became a feminist force.
And yet there is such tenderness in the domestic moments too. There is a scene where Leonora is looking after her son Gabi, who is unwell, and she rustles up a soup for him, to the quiet bemusement of her husband. Those small human touches made the portrayal all the more powerful.
Olivia Vinall plays it brilliantly, never losing the strength and curiosity that drive Leonora forward, but never pulling away from the weight of what she endured either. Tenacity. That is what she embodies. And rebellion.
It emerged in the Q&A that Olivia had spent time at the same Catholic boarding school from which Leonora had been expelled, St Mary's Ascot, sister school to the one I attended in Dorset for sixth form. It struck me that the experience of being educated by nuns, for better or worse, opens up another language, one that may well have informed Leonora's draw to the mystical in Mexico.
It also brought to mind Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican mystic, dramaturg, poet and visionary of the Golden Age, born illegitimate, hungry for learning, devoted to female connection through a language large enough to contain her. I was one of only two students who turned up for a lecture about her at university. The other was a girl from New Hall. Another school Leonora got kicked out of. Funny how these threads keep weaving themselves in.
As for Remedios Varo, Olivia said hers was the most important relationship in the film for her:
"As sisters, as women, as mothers. I felt very connected from the beginning and hope that the spirits feel we've done them justice."
She really did.
I was also moved by the character of Edward James as an extraordinarily kind and patient friend, someone who had clearly faced his own darkness and was holding out a hand from the other side. Everything about him radiated peace, from the moment we saw the yellow kaftan. Ryan Gage brought him to life with a stillness and grace that felt entirely right for a man who expressed himself most fully through the gardens he built and the art of others he championed.
I later discovered that Edward James' family home is West Dean, now a hub of creative workshops, and here serendipity steps in. When my father retired in his seventies, he took up wood carving there. I have only one piece of his, the very first he made, in fact. An owl. It came with me to university and has been watching over me ever since, standing in a wooden sake box, a gift from Japanese students I gave tours to one summer. He watches as I write now, with his big round eyes. Another guardian animal, perhaps. Not a horse or a hyena, but mine. And fitting too, for the owl is the original lunar bird, a creature of the moon in Celtic tradition, keeper of hidden wisdom, at home in the dark. Carrington would have approved.
A small aside, and a delight: the very well-known Mexican actor Luis Gerardo Méndez appears in two different roles in the film. An audience member spotted it in the Q&A, which gave added wit to the moment when Leonora meets the psychologist and asks, with perfect innocence, whether they have met before, because he seems somehow familiar. Apparently it brought the house down when the film screened in Mexico.
Anna had drawn out so much from the directors and cast in the Q&A afterwards, much of which I have already woven in here. It deepened our appreciation of the artistic process and sparked an immediate desire to learn more about Leonora's life, not only as a painter but as a writer too. After the screening, we found the cast and crew still milling around and took a surreptitious selfie with the directors in the background.
Lena clocked us and photobombed with a wave.
There was something about her energy, cheerful, natural, going with the flow, that propelled me to go over and ask, rather sheepishly, for a proper one. She and Thor were both gracious and welcoming, and being skilled in the art of direction, Lena of the long arms took charge of the phone and took the shot.
What struck me again, as it had in the Q&A, was their authenticity. An ease of being themselves that I am, in many ways, still searching for. Which is perhaps why it resonated so deeply when Leonora speaks to Ernst about finding herself through her painting. That is what drives me to write. To figure things out. To see where it takes me.
In this instance it took us back to the bar, where the three of us got a bottle of rosé and put the world to rights with a joy and elation that carried us all the way home.
Carrington's world, scholars tell us, was lunar rather than solar, cyclical, tidal, governed by the feminine rhythms of the moon. She painted it as a goddess at sixteen in a series called Sisters of the Moon, and returned to it all her life, moon and water inseparable in her symbolic language.
Later, looking up Mariá Portugal, the composer of the film’s score, I found myself listening to another of her compositions Dois Litorais, “Two Coasts” or “Two Shorelines.” Of course. The film had already opened that channel in me, moon, water, borders, crossings, and the strange pull between distant shores.
So it felt entirely right to be walking home under an increasingly full moon, thinking about those references in the film, and then further back, to that night in Tarifa when I learned my father had died. I had taken solace by paddling in the ocean, looking out across the lights of Tangiers, knowing that the full moon watching over me had also been watching over him in Petersfield as his spirit slipped upwards, and that those waters connected all the way back to the English coast.
I am part of an open water women's swimming group that celebrates each lunar cycle with a gathering and a swim. As I write this, a blue moon is on its way. There is something Carrington would have recognised entirely in that ritual: women, water, moonlight, and the particular kind of knowing that passes between them.
Back home, and back from my reverie, I crept in the front door just past midnight. Just as I was about to hit the sack, a small voice called out. My daughter had woken with the onset of a migraine. I gave her medication and stayed by her side until she fell asleep, folding back into that moment in the film where Leonora puts her son to bed.
Time, space and experience folding in on themselves. Moonlight, motherhood, water, art.
"The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings." (Mary Oliver)
Postscript
The next day I messaged a friend about the film, thinking he would love it. It turned out one of his friends has also made a film about Leonora Carrington, a very different, experimental dance film called Inside the Cauldron, taking its cue from one of her essays rather than her life. It features historian Marina Warner, who wrote the seminal Alone of All Her Sex on the myth of Mary and the power of the feminine. Marina Warner also went to St Mary's Ascot. Synchronicity, encore.
El Juglar
There is one more thing. In 2005, El Juglar, a painting by Leonora Carrington, sold at Christie's for $713,000, setting the record at the time for the highest price paid at auction for a living surrealist painter. She died in 2011. Then, in 2024, Les Distractions de Dagobert sold at Sotheby's for £22.5 million, making her the highest-selling British female artist in history. The market, rather belatedly, caught up with the vision.
A juggler keeps things in the air. Holds the impossible in motion. Finds the magic in the ordinary and makes it look like play. It seems the right note to end on, because that is what the film does, and what Leonora did, and what, on a good night, walking home under a near-full moon after rosé with good friends and something new living in you, we all get to do too.
I began this reflection by asking you not to read this post if you had not yet seen the film. If by any chance you ignored me, please just go and watch it, feel it, when you can.
It is on general release now. And the Freud Museum, until 10 August 2026, is waiting.
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