Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme three, part three - a film chosen by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 100 essential to an ideal library!
(Chosen by John!)
A part of me is screaming there's no way I can do this film justice. It's a biopic about Vincent Van Gogh, one of the great European masters, a figure whose work and legacy are a tangled intersection of mental illness, impressionism, romanticism, and the nature of art itself. It's a film by Maurice Pialat, one of France's most challenging directors, a man whose preference for simplicity and a sense of the real betrays an eye for complex beauty, inner turmoil, and a kind of fantastical attitude towards reality. It has been hailed as a masterwork both in the context of art about Van Gogh (of which I have seen very little), and Pialat's filmography (of which I have seen none.) "You've been fraying with all these reviews you've been writing lately," I say to myself. "You've taken on far too much to do even a simple film justice, much less something with mountains of required reading attached like this picture. You should just shut up and admit you won't get anything good out of this, because anything you say will be shallow and ill-informed and of no use to anyone who wants to read about Van Gogh."
Perhaps. I confess to struggling with sitting still during the two hour, forty minute runtime of Van Gogh, and to great difficulty focusing when trying to read up on relevant materials to spruce my knowledgebase and say something a little more interesting. I certainly won't match the insight in a Sense of Cinema article with this write-up. However, if ever there were a film where my lack of insight seemed a good match to its contents, it would be Van Gogh. Even with as little as I know, I can tell at a glance how Pialat chose a fundamentally different approach to Van Gogh from the popular conception, and how this approach is one friendly to simpler perspectives, much as it also invites deeper digging.
You and I know the image of Vincent Van Gogh. Lust for Life draws on the popular conception of a mad artist wracked by fits of insanity amidst landscapes inspired by his vibrant paintings. Don McLean eulogized him as a misunderstood lover who saw beauty where others found none. Doctor Who posited there was something inherently different and special about the way he saw the world, which drove both his unique painterly style and the mental problems that led to his early suicide. Most recently, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman spent nine years painstakingly replicating Van Gogh's brushstrokes to animate a biopic about his life in the direct form of his paintings in Loving Vincent. In a generalized sense, he's shorthand for a misunderstood genius, someone given to wild displays of poor physical and mental health, a longer never recognized until after he was gone too soon, a man completely defined by his highest highs and lowest lows. Art seriously reckoning with his life and legacy will speculate, venerate, celebrate, agitate, and overall canonize the image of Vincent Van Gogh, Special Artist Who Saw The World Differently. It seems to be practically the only way most folks know to discuss his life.
Pialat takes a different tact with Van Gogh. Following Jacquest Dutronc as the artist during his final two months in Auvers-sur-Oise under the dubious care of Doctor Gachet, Van Gogh has gained note for how it eschews the paintings and the madness almost entirely. Vincent paints plenty throughout the film, and his difficulties with gaining notice under his younger brother and only dealer Theo, but the works are always framed as the products of labor, afforded little more prominence in the frame or note as something special than anything else in his life. Several of Vincent's most famous works are entirely absent, and others are glimpsed in the corner of but one single shot. As to his struggles with mental illness, we see more than our share as the film pushes through its second and third acts, yet any impression that Vincent has severe troubles of the mind is confined to discussions of vague past difficulties and a repeating headache throughout the first. Otherwise, he seems a personable enough man, one who has a tough time connecting with women and seems moodier than those around him, but hardly a tortured artist whose experiences here are ultimately prelude to a suicide in sixty days' time. Some brief fiddling with a gun while discussing the topic and a reassurance to his brother that he's not suicidal are about all we get, and those two events are separated by a solid hour.
The most prominent facts about Vincent Van Gogh thus relegated to the margins, the central narrative and visual focus of Van Gogh thus becomes what other works might consider the margins. Vincent taking idle walks amidst fields of wheat and olive trees, Vincent struggling with how sincere his brother and doctor are about their relationships, Vincent trying to romance Gachet's young daughter or else conversing with prostitutes, Vincent acting lively as can be at an outdoors party. Whether any of this is remarkable on its own or not, I couldn't tell you - the images are certainly beautiful, the performances certainly painful, the conversations certainly intriguing, but we are talking about work in an anti-melodramatic mode, which I typically blanch at and find incredibly difficult to read. The structure is admirable for the way it gradually introduces more of Van Gogh's unhealthy behavior until Dutronc is an emotionally unstable mess, hopping from peak to valley in the middle of otherwise ordinary conversation. The imagery is all beautiful, drawing on motifs from Van Gogh's work without tackily trying to duplicate his famous paintings. The silence between moments of revelry or conversation rings with power, and the tendency to compress important events to their beginning and ending with a quick cut tells us everything we need to know about how present the man himself is despite our own lengthy time at his side.
But again, I have little proper frame of reference for Pialat or Van Gogh's respective catalogs, and do not think myself capable of fully communicating this film's import or quality. What I DO possess, is a long-running streak of adoring works of art that emphasize the simple fact of our existence, and while for most of Van Gogh I find its commitment to the margins of Vincent's life an intriguing if difficult to sit through experience in my current headspace, its conclusion and method of presenting his suicide grabs me most of all. The way Pialat avoids implying any of the negative, draining events from the previous hour are THE central influence on Vincent's decision to shoot himself is a lovely touch on its own - there's a montage of people around town preparing for their day like nothing's wrong, Vincent included, which gets across how there's no poetry or grandiosity to a suicide, just a spur of the moment decision we don't get to see - but the drag through his prolonged death really makes it. As was the case for much of the film, Vincent isn't on-camera for long stretches of his own dying, the camera instead following supporting cast and background characters as they concern themselves with the preparations and busywork of housing a dying man. His actual passing takes place behind a cut, and we're afforded a single shot of people mourning before the film transitions to an extended sequence of life returning to normal. The proprietor's wife gets more cameratime after busting her foot on an opening door than Vincent does as he slips away from a self-inflicted bullet wound.
This may seem cruel, and I could see how it could become undoubtedly so with a shorter, less personal film behind it. With so much of Van Gogh focused on the living of daily life in an unremarkable way, though, I find this approach entirely appropriate. In the grand scheme of things, there was nothing remarkable or important about Vincent Van Gogh if you follow him as a man like any other. He rose, he worked, he spoke, he ate somewhat less than he should have, he fought, he loved, he dreamed, he died. Never minding all the sensational, myth-ready forms his illness manifested and the incredible, universally-valued paintings, we find over this lengthy picture a man whose most vital, important facet was that he lived at all. When he passes, others live on, touched by his presence depending on how close they were to him in life, but not defined by it as if they knew some great, immortal artist was gone too soon. It seems small, and yet it is two-and-a-half hours plus of simply observing he was here, same as you or I. There's kindness and empathy in not treating him as a great or a master or an all-time tragedy - his death as lowkey and personal as his life, and then the lives of others take over and the world moves on, as it would and will for all others.
I find it good and right to do this. To afford the simplicity of following the day to day free from the constraints of legacy until their presence and influence over Van Gogh's life are impossible to ignore, and even then only affording them as much importance as necessary to communicate the idea before returning to form. One becomes so concerned with understanding and communicating the grandiosity of what The Great Vincent Van Gogh or The Great Maurice Pialat DID, what they MEANT, what they LEFT US TO AGONIZE OVER LEST WE MISS SOME COSMIC MEANING, that one risks missing how they were just people in the end. And in the beginning, and the middle, and all the parts in between. The small stuff matters, even if so much of the small stuff over so much movie is difficult to watch through if you're not in the right mind for it, and while I know there's so much more complex analysis to perform with respect to Van Gogh and all it embodies, much as I wish I could engage in it right off the top of my head amidst this overstuffed schedule in a stressful time in my life, I think it satisfactory enough to note all this. To say Van Gogh is a beautiful film about the need to appreciate the greats as average, unremarkable people under the right circumstances, how there's nothing wrong with understanding a life through its most ordinary moments, leaves me feeling fulfilled by the watching.
For the time, others can write nuanced essays about Van Gogh and Pialat. I'm happy to say what I've said, think what I've thought, and put a pin here to return when I have better resources and a clearer head to do more. If I never return, what I've mined from this source is still good enough for my money.
4/5
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