People climb tall mountains “because they’re there.” “Loving Vincent” which closed the Antalya Film Festival last week, suggests a similarly glib and unsatisfying explanation as to why directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman would spend 7 years engaging 125 artists to laboriously oil-paint every single frame of a feature film (62,450 frames, to be precise), in order to tell the story of Vincent Van Gogh’s last days: because they (just about) could. The film is a fascinating exercise in self-defeating self-justification: narratively simplistic in how it repackages some recent theories about Van Gogh’s death into an Agatha Christie-like who/how/whydunnit, the tortuous method of its creation, more than the final result, becomes its chief reason for existing.
The movie was first filmed as normal, with a cast not quite as starry as Van Gogh’s night sky, but still boasting more than a few faces recognisable beneath all that linseed (Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn, Saoirse Ronan, Chris O’Dowd, John Sessions and Helen McCrory all turn up). And then the artists handpainted over each frame in an approximation of the Dutch artist’s dynamic, swirling style, using the photographic image as a kind of sketch underlay, like a very labor-intensive version of rotoscoping. So there could be an art-piece version of this project which would be hanging all 62,450 “paintings” in sequence in a gallery, so that visitors could admire the texture of the impasto, feel the warmth of tactile human input, note the influence of the cinematic form on the painted form and marvel at the grand scale of this folly. But instead “Loving Vincent,” obviously, translates all that quixotic labor back into a 90-minute film, where it requires an effort of will to remind yourself that this is not some snazzy, hyperfiltered CG effect, but the work of real brushes, sticky with pigment and oil, and where every time you do, a small voice asks “but why?”
Thankfully, the film does not attempt to go the straight biopic route, as such a deliberately distracting treatment given to a bloated birth-to-death retelling might well be unbearable. Instead, it begins a year after Van Gogh suffered the gunshot wound to the stomach that eventually killed him, after two agonizing days, in his room in the northern French village of Auvers-sur-Oise.
Rather than Van Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk) himself, it follows the fictionalized journey of one of his real-life subjects, Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), whom the artist painted as a handsome young man in an ostentatious yellow jacket and jaunty hat. Armand was the son of the Arles postmaster Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd), a big, rumpled man with a bushy, forked beard, also painted by Van Gogh in a series of portraits, who had befriended the painter during his stay in his town in the years before his death. The opening scene is Joseph tasking his son with the delivery of one last letter that had somehow been misplaced in the confusion following Van Gogh’s death — Vincent’s prodigious correspondence with his brother Theo is a matter of record. But when Armand arrives in Auvers-sur-Oise, he discovers that Theo died just six months after his brother. Undeterred, he quickly becomes embroiled in the little town’s mythmaking about its soon-to-be-most famous visitor, and resolves to deliver the letter to the next most deserving recipient, even if he has to get to the bottom of all the conflicting reports about Van Gogh’s death to do so.
There are frequent flashbacks, rendered, in a rather confusing stylistic decision, in more photo-real black-and-white animation, which gives the filmmakers license to cover scenes from Vincent’s life for which no guideline paintings exist. But most of the information in the film is ploddingly dispensed in various one-on-one encounters between Roulin and the townspeople who knew the artist: Sometimes the film’s storytelling has the crude feel of a video game in which every person you encounter in the village immediately goes into a long, clue-and-red-herring-laden monologue as to the location of the wizard’s treasure. Was Vincent friends with the local doctor Gachet (Jerome Flynn), or were they enemies, as insisted on by the innkeeper’s pert daughter (Eleanor Tomlinson)? Was he in love with Gachet’s daughter Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan) as the boatman (Aidan Turner) believes, or indifferent to her as she herself claims? Did he really shoot himself in the stomach in a fit of suicidal melancholia, or was the shooting, as was put forward in a controversial 2011 biography, actually a kind of accidental manslaughter by a teenaged villager who had taken to tormenting the painter?
Rendered in an accurate simulation of the palettes Van Gogh used, costumed in dresses and coats that could have been lifted from his portraits and set in locations that lovingly mimic his famous wheatfields, steepled towns, cypress trees and scudding skies, the film is often a pleasure to look at, particularly as it forms itself, more or less incidentally into an exact replica of one of his more famous works. But the point of Van Gogh’s style on the canvas was always its dynamism, its motility, so to see that style in motion is a curiously over-literal treat.
“Loving Vincent” is also hampered by its artists not just being slaves to the imitation of a great master, but by further being tied to the cinematic form — especially noticeable in the close-ups, on which the often rather talky film is reliant, which tend not to be as convincingly painterly as the wides. And that’s not just because of the cognitive dissonance that goes on when you look at a Van Gogh-ified moving painting of Douglas Booth trying to resemble an actual Van Gogh painting of a man who did not really look like Douglas Booth at all.
It means that it’s difficult to parse the film as an actual piece of cinema. And when you do, when you try to pick off the layers of paint to find an actual performance underneath, or to pierce the swirling brushstrokes to really connect with the mono-otic master it purportedly loves, you are expressly working against its very reason for being. And so the only choice, really, is to give in to the quaint mystery plot and the pretty images swooping and swirling around to the strains of Clint Mansell‘s pleasantly melancholic score, and to stop questioning the monomania it takes to spend 7 years on something so inherently ersatz, that only widens the gulf between effortful, reverent imitation and quick, free, deliriously inspired original. [B-]