This is not the kind of story that is fashionable at the moment, and the theme of a white, male Great Artist rejuvenating himself through contact with the Other is certainly open to critique. The film seems aware of this, but not too urgently: most crucially, it glosses over the fact that Teha'amana or "Tehura", the first of Gauguin's several Tahitian "wives," was by his own account just 13 when their relationship began.

Tuhei Adams, the newcomer who plays Tehura here, was 17 at the time of the shoot and looks no younger, and the "marriage" portrayed here is a fully consensual one. She is offered to Gauguin by her family soon after his arrival, apparently as a gesture of goodwill – and despite the barriers of age, race and culture, smilingly agrees to the union.

Things between them do not entirely run smoothly, with Tehura's interest in a local man closer to her own age (Pua-Tai Hikutini) creating a love triangle of sorts. But she's such an under-realised character that it's hard to fathom what drives her at any point (a filmmaker like Terrence Malick – who has been accused of chauvinist exoticism – would have tried far harder to convey her point of view).

There are other touches in the margins of the film that threaten to complicate the picture, as when Gauguin flies into a rage on realising he has unwittingly taught his Tahitian friends that their culture can be shaped into a commodity marketable to outsiders.

But for the most part this is an idyll, a genre where drama and suspense are pushed to the side. Much screen time is devoted to Gauguin's everyday activities – painting nonstop, going on fishing trips, and shrugging off the warnings of a Western doctor (Malik Zidi) who warns him that he needs to return home to seek medical attention.

Cassel isn't bad, although even he is more like a figure in a series of illustrations than a full-fledged character, defined by his battered brown hat, unkempt grey beard and glittering eyes. Hobbling around his hut or riding an old nag into the hills, he comes off as a kind of Don Quixote, too caught up in his own dream to notice the afflictions of age.

To ensure that we, too, are lured into this dream, Deluc takes care to make the Paris where the film begins look as dark and oppressive as possible, in contrast to the sunlit vistas that open up in Tahiti (Gauguin's actual voyage there – which included stop-offs in Melbourne and Sydney – is wholly skipped over).

Dominated by hazy greenery, the film's landscape bears no direct visual resemblance to the heightened exoticism of Gauguin's paintings, which anticipate the Technicolor glory days of Old Hollywood. It does, however, tap into one side of the appeal that these paintings have always held – though without suggesting anything interesting about how we might look at them afresh today.