Last night, I sat in a theater watching “Colours of Time,” Cédric Klapisch’s new film about four cousins who inherit a shuttered house in Normandy. I highly recommend the movie for anyone thinking of cruising the Seine.

The movie moves between the present and the Paris of the 1890s. Monet is a central character in it, played first as a young man and later, gray and settled. I recognized the Giverny scenes right away, filmed in Monet’s actual garden. I also recognized Le Havre, and the MuMa — the harborside museum built to hold one of France’s largest Impressionist collections outside the Musée d’Orsay, its glass walls tuned to catch the same shifting Channel light the painters were chasing. The four cousins in the movie bring the painting they found in the house to have it authenticated as a genuine Monet by a historian at the MuMa.

Another scene I enjoyed was a steamship, chugging up the Seine toward Paris, passing beneath the chalk hillsides near Les Andelys — the same bend in the river where Richard the Lionheart built Château Gaillard, the ruin I wrote about in On The Seine: Richard The Lionheart, Monet & The Chalk Cliffs Of Normandy. In fact, the movie traces almost exactly the route I mapped in my Seine installment of “What The Rivers Remember.”

I’ve cruised the Seine many times, and even biked along its shores, but I’ll see the river anew the next time I’m back on it. The movie gave me a new perspective, and so did my own reporting. The film gives life to Monet and the house and garden he tended by hand. My piece gave him a harbor at Le Havre, where he painted a sunrise scene that would give birth to Impressionism.

The characters and the scenery were evocative, and I found myself, along with the friends watching with me, wanting to return to France, particularly to Paris. I’m glad to be doing so next summer.

In June, we’ll cruise a different stretch of the Seine, but the great painters still punctuate the route. Trip 1 follows the Oise north of Paris through Auvers-sur-Oise, where Van Gogh spent the last weeks of his life, painted some 70 canvases in barely ten weeks and is buried in the village cemetery.

From there, on its last afternoon, the barge joins the Seine itself for the run into Paris, through Bougival. I photographed a marker there once, on the Île de la Chaussée, laying out how Monet, Renoir and Berthe Morisot all painted that same bend of river. Monet’s “Le Pont de Bougival” and “La Seine à Bougival” both date to 1869, the same summer he and Renoir set up their easels side by side at nearby La Grenouillère, working out the quick, broken brushwork that historians now call the technical birth of Impressionism, three years before the movement had a name.

Trip 2 follows the Petite Seine south to Sens, through Barbizon, where Corot, Millet and Rousseau were painting outdoors a generation before that. Neither trip reaches Les Andelys or Vernon — the river town that serves as the gateway to Giverny — but between the two, we’ll cross the water where Monet, Van Gogh and the rest of that generation created images that continue to endure and inspire. I can’t wait to return to see these magnificent regions through a new lens.

Details on both trips are here.