Poland/UK/USA  –  Animation/Biography  –  Year: 2017  –  Running time: 94 mins
Language: English

Synopsis:

A story depicted in highly experimental oil painted animation, with actors playing scripted roles
while digital software apparently facilitates the over-painting.  A young man comes to the last
hometown of painter van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist’s final letter and ends up investigating
his last days.  An intriguing, impressive and accomplished work of cinema.

The sheer ambition and scope of this labour of love is an astonishing achievement. The screen shimmers as a living organism befitting and indeed resembling the work of its subject..
Matthew Anderson (CineVue)

Directors: Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman
Cast:
Douglas Booth                                …   Armand Roulin
Josh Burdett                                    …   The Zouave
Holly Earl                                         …   La Mousme
Robin Hodges                                 …   Lieutenant Milliet
Chris O’Dowd                                  …   Postman Joseph Roulin
John Sessions                                 …   Pere Tanguy
Helen McCrory                                …   Louise Chevalier
(for full cast, and more information, see “Loving Vincent” in IMDB)

CFC Film Notes

Did Vincent van Gogh, as first suggested in the biography of 2011 by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White, not actually shoot himself, but rather was shot as a result of a bizarre prank by a local bully, one Rene Secretan, a 16-years old who was tormenting poor Vincent and loved to swagger round the fields in a cowboy costume carrying a pistol?  Did Vincent claim, on his death bed, that he had killed himself, perhaps out of weary despair, or a desire not to make posthumous trouble for the neighbourhood, or perhaps simply to avoid the ignominy of an absurd end, and claim the awful glamour of suicide?  This theme is explored in what has been described as an intriguing, possibly weirdly exasperating, oddity of a film, with its scintillatingly impressive technique of, apparently, hand-painting every frame which can be seen as a pastiche of a van Gogh canvas.

Landscapes pulse and throb: brushstrokes bristle on skies, or people’s faces, like autumn leaves.  Sometimes specific images are coyly referenced – although the film stops short at sunflowers themselves!  The directors have created live-action footage with actors playing scripted roles and then digital software appears to have been used to facilitate the over-painting.  The style has been likened to the rotoscope technique on Richard Linklater’s eerie, dreamlike film “Waking Life” from 2001, or Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir” in 2008.  Here, though, real, oozing paint has been painstakingly used.  Peter Bradshaw in ‘The Guardian’ makes an intriguing analogy, asking “Are Welchman and Kobiela like old-school London cab drivers finding their way around with the ‘knowledge’ while everyone else has satnav?”

Douglas Booth plays Armand Roulin, son of the local postmaster, played by Chris O’Dowd, in Auvers-sur-Oise,   where van Gogh ended his life in illness and poverty: van Gogh did portraits, of course, of both of them.  On the narrative pretext of delivering a letter from van Gogh to his brother Theo, Armand makes it his business to discover what actually happened and he talks to many famous portrait subjects. Robert Gulaczyk plays van Gogh.  The flashbacks are in the form of monochrome pencil drawings.

Bradshaw, again, makes the point: “ [the film] is accomplished and … impressive.  And as van Gogh did paint so much, so indefatigably, it is almost as if a whole pictorial world could perhaps be put together, just as this film has been…, from his canvases alone.”  Bradshaw, with other critics, also suggests that the whole movie is really about ‘style’, rather than telling us very much about van Gogh’s work or his life.

Having watched this film, you may like to go on-line and read the review by the art critic Jonathan Jones, also originally published in The Guardian.  He has some trenchant views on the ‘art industry’ which surrounds ‘great’ artists like Van Gogh and reiterates the point that this is not a film to help us learn more about the artist’s life – far from it! – but that viewers may find some real enjoyment from the efforts of the artists who contributed to ‘creating an entire film from pastiches of Van Gogh’s art.”

Selected UK reviews:

Observer (Wendy Ide)
The Telegraph (Tim Robey) 
The Independent (Geoffrey Macnab)