The foremost quality of Loving Vincent is that it’s not like anything you have experienced on cinema screen before. The admirers of Vincent van Gogh (if you’re reading this piece, then you most certainly are) are aware of how the painter’s works have a way of inducing psychedelia if stared for continuous minutes. In the filmic imagination of Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, an entire film springs to throbbing life, fully immersed in the prodigious artist’s bold brushstrokes.
The film was shot with actors like any live-action film, before allowing digital deception to take over the footage, like rotoscope technique in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001). But the directors here have taken on something very stimulating and special. They have re-rendered every frame — more than 65,000 of them — in oil painting, put together painstakingly by a team of more than 100 painters. The end result is a swirling reverie of colours and motion as if van Gogh’s ghost was guiding it.
This is both the asset and the feebleness of this courageous effort.
If the exquisiteness of the film mounts itself impressively before your admiring eyes, the narrative bows down to its laxity.
The plot follows Armand Roulin (played by Douglas Booth), the son of a postmaster, instructed by his father to deliver a letter to Vincent’s brother Theo in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town near Paris where the painter breathed his last, leaving behind fragmented remembrances. The letter is a ‘rosebud’ like Macguffin, which allows Roulin encounter different subjects of Vincent’s paintings and life to recount what really happened. Did he commit suicide, or someone snuffed him out deliberately?
Vincent van Gogh has been a perpetual fixation of the modern world because he fits the perfect romantic prototype of a tormented artist. He has been raised from the dead by many esteemed filmmakers, from Vincente Minnelli, Alain Resnais, Akira Kurosawa to Robert Altman, with different measures of success.
In an unusual form of biopic, Kobiela and Welchman’s film reconstructs van Gogh’s final weeks by exhuming questions of potency but the consequential answers never really come together in a single thread, leaving behind a meandering procedural that is more interested in evoking the existential spasm than solving a mystery.
But this enchantment is a determined kind — your eyes glued to the hallucination of blue clouds, creamy-yellow sun, grey rainfall, blinking night sky, and faces that pulsate like autumnal melancholy.
It’s the lack of insight that looms large, not only in narrative, but also in the animation — however impressive, it remains imprisoned in its admiration for the dead artist, rolling out pictorial brilliance devoid of real expression.
As biographers and researchers have pointed out, van Gogh was unremittingly anguished by the yearning to embody what he sees – a tussle to figure out how beauty should be represented, and what role does art play in the world’s consciousness. He always felt misunderstood, a growing agony that everyone has given up on him, yet he sheltered a never-dying love for the world which found impulsive articulation in the hundreds of paintings he left behind.
This co-existence of contradictory ideas never blossoms in Loving Vincent’s beauteous enactment, something that John Hurt’s voice did wonderfully and hauntingly in Paul Cox’s documentary of empathy — Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh (1987).
As the man said, “The sadness will last forever.”
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a creative producer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder)
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