Van Gough Review

• 24th Sep 2013

There have been many films about the life of Vincent Van Gogh. He is an artist who carries a lot of mythology which surrounds him. For sure he is a household name and most people know something about him: be it his flaming red hair and beard through his self-portraits, the style of his paintings, that he was the painter of sunflowers, he cut off his ear and committed suicide as a failed artist without having sold anything (this was untrue he did sell one painting, ‘The Red Vineyard’ a few months before his death). While we have a lot of knowledge about the artists life and what he thought through the hundreds of letters he wrote to his art dealer brother, Theo we still get different interpretations and a great deal of myth surrounding this enigmatic artist.

One of the most famous of these interpretations is the 1956 Hollywood film directed by Vincente Minnelli and based off Irving Stone’s novel starring the Hollywood superstar Kirk Douglas. Famously Douglas became absolutely lost in the role to the point of his own near self destruction. Much of the myth of Van Gogh comes from Stone’s book and this MGM production. What can’t be denied is what a wonderful, slightly flawed and powerfully entertaining film Lust for Life was. Released in 1990, the 100^th anniversary since the death of Vincent Van Gogh Vincent and Theo was released about the relationship between the artist and his brother with Tim Roth this time playing the self destructive mad artist. Both films missed out the intellectual side of Van Gogh’s life and while Douglas’s interpretation may have portrayed his passionate and sensitive side, both films dismissed another aspect of Vincent’s nature. Maurice Pialat’s 1991 French film tried to approach from a more pastoral and calmer aspect.

Pialat’s film, very long at almost 160 minutes only focuses on the last 92 days of the artist’s life from when he arrived in the northern French town of Auvers-sur-Oise to be cared for and treated by a Dr. Gachet who was a supporter and admirer of the new Impressionist and Post Impressionist art; he was also friends with a fellow artist Paul Cézanne. Previous to this Van Gogh had been in the sanatorium in the Provencal town of St. Remy after cutting off the lobe of his ear. When Van Gogh (played by Jacques Dutronc) arrives at Auvers he seems far from insane, is welcomed by the Gachet family and takes up residence in the town’s central hotel. There Vincent forms a fictitious friendship and an attraction for Gachet’s daughter, much to the doctor’s disapproval as well as with some of the local prostitutes he befriends. All seems to be going well until throughout that last summer he grows increasingly disenchanted with his work and the apparent sub-conscious change in direction his work is taking. Soon he seems to be falling back into his old ways, clashes with his brother (who has recently married and had sired a baby) becomes attracted to drinking absinthe and spending times with the local tarts in the Moulin Rouge with a docile Toulouse-Lautrec at hand. The Moulin Rouge scenes tend to fall into cliché with the walls decked out with Lautrec murals, the can-can being danced and Vincent’s unpredictable behaviour which grows more unpredictable as the film develops.

As a pastoral and as costume drama the film is beautiful to look at; in Blu-ray even more so with some sharp golden images of the halcyon days of summer and is a beautiful feast for the eyes. Dutronc, a popular pop star in France in the 1960s doesn’t entirely convince as the self destructive artist who seems far from being either sensitive or passionate. But is this because we have an idea in our minds as to who Van Gogh really was, or does the character not ring true with the artist we are familiar with through these letters and paintings? Perhaps no screen or literary interpretation has got it right yet. Reading Van Gogh’s letters and the sensitivity to his subject matter on canvas is enough to convince that that is the case. Pialat’s direction also borders on the pretentious and arty for the sake of it while the overstretched length of the film seems unnecessary makes the film something of a chore to get through and given the subject this should not be the case.

Released by Eureka! in their Masters of Cinema series the film, as one would expect from Eureka! is packed with contextualizing extras on a second disc including a feature length documentary on Van Gogh made by Pialat in 1965, as well as a host of interviews and features on Pialat and interviews with the cast and crew on the film as well as deleted scenes and the usual thick 56 page book with extras and photos but sadly this was not available to review.

Chris Hick