Starring Guillaume Canet. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG

Any decently budgeted tale based on the parallel lives of painter Paul Cézanne and writer Emile Zola is going to have something to offer. Cézanne et moi certainly isn’t hard to sit through, and it benefits greatly from the use of many original locations in yellow-gray Paris and sunny, riverside Provence, seemingly unchanged from their 19th-century iterations. But it feels more like a cautious TV movie than the kind of bold treatment their iconoclastic work would merit.

Despite their temperamental differences, Cézanne (Guillaume Gallienne, who played Pierre Bergé in Yves Saint Laurent) and Zola (Tell No One’s Guillaume Canet) were also connected by their addiction to and reactions against bourgeois comfort. So viewers may be forgiven for thinking their lives were more about money than art. Indeed, almost every scene devolves into a tedious conflict about who’s the bigger sellout. “What, another new smoking jacket, Emile?”

Monaco-born director Danièle Thompson wrote witty scripts for Queen Margot and her own Avenue Montaigne, so it’s surprising that she came up with such a turgid structure for this one. She, presumably, started with Zola’s letters, hence the slant toward the writer’s POV and a stuffy, overdetermined style. She sticks to the now de rigueur pattern of seemingly random time-jumping, when straight chronology would likely work as well or better. Of course, this gives the actors a chance to show off their aging makeup in more varied ways. In this and other ways, Gallienne fares better of the two Guillaumes, as the born-rich-but-struggling Cézanne gets more bohemian as he grows older, and raised-in-poverty Zola rakes in the dough for his social-realist novels and essays.

Although the two-hour movie shows us the various Monets and Manets along the way, it isn’t really that interested in what these men created. Similarly, it displays the models, wives, mistresses, and maids they fought over but doesn’t spend much time with what they think or feel about these famous dudes. Couldn’t Moi be a woman for once?