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Douglas Booth becomes a painting in the unique Loving Vincent |
Director: Doreta Kobiela, Hugh Welchman
Cast: Douglas Booth (Armand Roulin), Jerome Flynn (Paul
Gachet), Saoirse Ronan (Marguerite Gachet), Helen McCrory (Louise Chevalier),
Chris O’Dowd (Joseph Roulin), John Sessions (Père Tanguy), Eleanor Tomlinson
(Adeline Ravoux), Aidan Turner (Boatman), Robert Gulaczyk (Vincent van Gogh)
Now this is something very different. It’s a common turn of
phrase to praise a well-photographed film by saying every frame looks like a
painting. Well Loving Vincent is a
film where every single frame is literally
a painting. A beautifully painted pastiche collection of van Goghs, painted
over a combination of motion capture and photographs of real locations. And, as
you would expect, it is beautiful.
The film covers events year after the suicide of Vincent van
Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk). Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) tries to deliver van
Gogh’s last letter to his brother Theo. Roulin’s father Joseph (Chris O’Dowd)
is also concerned that there is more to the death than meets the eye, as van
Gogh had written to him that all was well in his life. Roulin travels first to
Paris and then to Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh spent his final days, talking
to those who knew him, including his landlady Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor
Tomlinson), his art supplier Père Tanguy (John Sessions), the daughter of his doctor
Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan) and finally Dr Gachet (Jerome Flynn) himself.
Loving Vincent
looks simply beautiful. Its quality is astonishing. The film was shot on green
screen with actors. Van Gogh’s paintings were then overlaid as backgrounds for
the action. The film was carefully edited, then every frame in the final film
was turned into a single hand painting – with real paint. 65,000 hand-painted
frames. It’s astonishing – you’ve never seen anything like this before. The
style, the homages to van Gogh, the respect and craft behind reproducing his
distinctive look – it’s marvellous. Every single image in the film demands you
linger upon it and soak it in.
I simply haven’t ever seen a film like this before. I can’t
imagine any film like this being made again (for starters it took years to make). It demands to be seen if
you have any interest in art or any interest in cinema as a visual artform.
It’s so impressively done, you start falling in love with its artistry. It’s
also got a poetic visual beauty to it. The flashbacks showing van Gogh’s last
few days are put together with a black-and-white pencil-drawn style, which
contrasts beautifully with the primary colours of the present day. The film
walks a brilliant tightrope line between “real” and dreamlike wonder – final
shots of van Gogh or sequences of Roulin dreaming feel like real visual
expressions of inner thoughts in their greater expressionist vibrancy.
If there is a weakness to the film, it is that (whisper it)
there isn’t much actually to it once you look past the visuals. It’s truly
unique in look and feel but the story it delivers is fairly traditional and
even (at times) a little flat. Despite being soaked in van Gogh I’m not sure
you learn too much about him or his art from the film, and the film shies away
from its more interesting topics. The dialogue or plotting rarely ventures
above the average.
Perhaps one of the most interesting themes of the film is
the struggle of the characters to understand and appreciate the difficulties of
depression: that suffers can be optimistic one minute, and consumed with
world-ending self-loathing the next. It would have been more interesting if the
film had engaged more with this theme, rather than trying to build a rather
flat murder mystery around van Gogh’s death. It also would have felt more true
to the actual struggles of the artist – crikey, this material was spun out into
an excellent Doctor Who episode,
which feels like it managed to get more understanding of van Gogh than this
film manages.
The acting however is pretty good – Douglas Booth anchors
the film every well as the nominal detective figure, struggling with his own
guilt over abandoning van Gogh. Saoirse Ronan is very good as a sad love opportunity
lost for van Gogh, Eleanor Tomlinson radiant as his friendly hostess, Jerome
Flynn tragically guilt-ridden and envious as Dr Gachet. It may not be a film
that really gives actors the opportunity to let rip, but it’s still good.
The main question over Loving
Vincent is whether there is enough to it to make it more than an art
experiment, or a curiosity. Plot and storyline wise it’s a very traditional,
rather straightforward film, but it carries a germ of depth in there. And then
the film looks so uniquely marvellous that you can’t deny it a certain place in
film history. Because you won’t see anything like this again, and if you have
any love for the artist or art in general, you have to check it out. Every
frame is literally a painting.
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