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Amazon Prime put this up, and it's as gorgeous as advertised, so now I really regret not having caught it in the cinema, because it must have been even more glorious to watch on the big screen, with (nearly) every frame a Van Gogh canvas, handpainted, not computer made. "Nearly", because there are black and white flashbacks interrupting the handpainted story now and then. At one point in Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo, Theo van Gogh says as a child he dreamt of stepping inside a painting and living there. Well, Loving Vincent is as close as you can get to fulfilling that dream.

Its narrative structure is that of a detective story involving exclusively fictionalized versions of people Van Gogh painted. A year after his death, the pov character, restless and moody Armand Roulin from Arles his charged by his father, the local postmaster, to deliver a leftover letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. (Roulin Père was friends with Vincent; Armand, not so much, and feeling slightly guilty about it feeds into his motivation through the film.) Finding out in Paris that Theo, too, has died, Armand ends up in Auvers where Vincent died, talking to various people about his last weeks, and essentially figuring out the theory first voiced in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White's 2011 Van Gogh biography. (That Vincent didn't kill himself, who actually did, and why Vincent would cover up for that person, since he did state to several people he tried to commit suicide in the almost two days between the shooting and his death.) As is proper for a detective tale, there are red herrings before the guilty party is identified, though then comes a last touch of ambiguity when the last person Armand talks to in the course of his investigation provides a pretty good motive why Vincent could have committed suicide after all.

But really, this is a film which lives by its art, in every sense of the word. It was in fact filmed using actors (who voice the characters in the final product), with the painted versions then using this as motion references. If simply the version of the actors had been onscreen, it would never have risen above being a tv bio special sort of thing, and I don't mean that as a put down, because the visuals are, to point out the glaringly obvious, the key part of what makes and unmakes a movie. Loving Vincent is an incredible achievement on that front, and that the emotion that comes with watching those Van Gogh paintings come to life and interact with each other would not be there in a conventionally filmed version isn't a criticism but an applause in my book. It also makes for a wonderful tribute to Van Gogh and manages to free his art from the post card feeling which inevitably arises now and then due to a million reproductions, bringing home its vibrancy.

(Mind you: his art from this later years. The earliest paintings referenced are the ones made in Paris when Armand is there; no Potato Eaters or other early attempts and drawings from Vincent's Dutch life.)

As to the characterisation of the central dead subject: the movie hammers home that a nervous breakdown does not a crazy man make, but otherwise is is pretty much standard Vincent van Gogh, gentle soul, martyr for his art, too good for this world. The black and white sequence of his backstory pre Paris as told by Pere Tanguy to Armand lays it on a bit thick on how he failed at everything before becoming a painter in order to enhance his woobieness even further. In fact, he started out pretty successful as an art dealer at Goupil's (where his uncle Cent worked and where later Theo would work as well), earning more with 20 than his father the pastor did at the same time. That he then came to fail at the art business and drop out of it came to be via a variety of circumstances - unrequited love, increasing religious fervour and increasing distaste for the way the firm commodified art while having increasingly strong art opinions himself.

Van Gogh having a temper of his own, though (and not just when having a breakdown in Arles), and actual flaws (his idea of making his cousin Kee change her mind after she'd turned him down repeatedly involved holding his hand into fire until she talked to him, and when he came to live with Theo in Paris for two years pre-Arles and post-Netherlands, Theo, inarguably the person who loved Vincent best and basically gave his life for him, found him impossible to live with at close quarters) is not something you'll find here, or in most Van Gogh biopics. (Vincent and Theo being the rare exception.) And it's easy to see why - the tragedy of his early death, that he only sold one of those amazing paintings during his life time, and his many virtues - he really was a social idealist in addition to being an artistic one, and very kind to a great many (usually poor) people, and he had the courage to utterly change his life not once but twice (from art dealer to missionary, and then from missionary to painter) in defiance of what (almost) everyone else thought. But given Loving Vincent chose as its pov a character who starts out with reservations about Vincent, I was wondering whether or not it would join this very rare number of fictional Van Gogh presentations allowing him some less than admirable traits as well. Which wasn't the case.

In conclusion: a feast for the eyes, a love declaration to Vincent van Gogh, and a work of art. If you're in a region where it's up on Amazon Prime as well, go watch!

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: Munich

Both the latest DW episode and comment from

wee_warrior reminded me of my favourite fictional depiction of Vincent Van Gogh, which is Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo. (I saw it in its cinematic version as a movie first, but he shot it as a tv miniseries, and that's how I acquired on dvd in February after visiting a fantastic Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, and then had the opportunity to rewatch.

To go through the competition first, the most famous fictionalisation of Van Gogh's life is probably Irving Stone's novel Lust for Life and the 1950s movie based on it, which stars Kirk Douglas as Vincent. Now I enjoy many a Stone biographical novel (my favourite is probably his take on Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy), and the Van Gogh novel that made his name is still very readable (and uses Van Gogh's letters to his brother a lot), but it's also strictly Vincent-as-martyr-and-saint-for-his-art, with only bad people misunderstanding him. (The film, which admittedly I haven't rewatched in eons, tons down something in Stone's novel that comes across quite differently than intended to today's readers, and that's the problem of Vincent's attempted relationships with women before he resigns himself to prostitutes. The one with his cousin Kee, whom he befriends and then tries to romance, only to find himself firmly rebuffed, has the problem of avid novel-reader Vincent being convinced that "no, never" means really "yes" if he tries hard enough, leading to stalking and a final attempt of seeing her by holding his hand in the fire in order to blackmail a meeting. This all actually happened - see a typical Kee-related later to his brother - , but the problem is that Stone presents it with an undertone of "how can this woman say no?".) Otoh, in the film, no character other than Vincent and possibly the few minutes of Gauguin as played by Anthony Quinn come to life; everyone else is sort of shadowy around.

Altman and his scriptwriter Julian Mitchell, by contrast, firstly exclude the early period of Vincent the failed art dealer and Vincent the failed Evangelist and the two failed attempts at romances within his own class and start at the very point where he decides to become a painter, secondly provide an additional emotional focus (additional to his development as a painter, that is) with the fraternal relationship (the film isn't named "Vincent and Theo" for nothing; Theo really is as important a main character as Vincent), and thirdly manage to handle their ensemble of supporting characters very well. Even those who are just around in a few scenes, like Sien the prostitute who models for Vincent and with whom he lives for a while, or Dr. Gachet (archly characterized as a phony and slightly creepy in his obessiveness about his daughter, which may be mean on the script's part but is a viable interpretation), are memorably written and played, and so is the most important of the supporting characters, Jo(hanna) Bonger, later Theo's wife. Sien and Jo, different as they are, are both realists, as opposed to the two neurotic idealists they're involved with. Actually, you can generally say that women in this film are refreshingly un-idealized or demonized but three dimensional and sane, whereas the men, and I don't just mean the Van Gogh boys, could all use therapy. But had they gotten it, we probably wouldn't have had a movie/miniseries.

Relations of geniuses, much like wives (or more rarely husbands) of geniuses, have it tough when it comes to biopics. If they aren't completely supportive, they, with the hindsight the audience has, Misunderstand The Genius, which makes them bad. Now, Theo van Gogh, four years younger than Vincent, was the original supportive relation. (Which didn't stop him being depicted as a hypocritical bourgois in the French movie Van Gogh, but that's another matter. Boo, hiss on the Theo bashing therein.) First he financed Vincent in secret, pretending the money came from their father, then openly for the rest of his brother's life; when Vincent died, Theo died six months later after a complete physical and mental breakdown. Until Mitchell & Altman, however, this in fictional representations didn't evoke much interest in what he was like. (For which we have admittedly way less material than for Vincent, because Theo kept all of Vincent's letters, starting from when Theo was 15 and Vincent was 19, to the last one Vincent had with him when he shot himself, whereas only a very few of Theo's letters survive, plus some descriptions from other people, since he was a well-liked art dealer who pushed for the impressionists.) Lust for Life the film makes him a shadowy saint in the background, the novel fleshes him about a bit more by letting Toulouse-Lautrec remark archly that "it's a pity Theo is a man and Vincent's brother, otherwise he'd make the ideal wife for him".

Vincent and Theo goes for a co-dependent sibling relationship of the first degree plus mutual passion for art; when Theo early on tells his mistress that as a boy he dreamt of entering a painting and remaining there forever, he expresses something that becomes in a cruel way true by the end when after his brother's death he is surrounded by Vincents' paintings and yells at his wife that this is the most important thing before breaking down entirely. It's anything but an idyllic relationship (they even get introduced with an argument, with classic Altman overlapping dialogue when Vincent shows his first sketches and Theo is less than impressed), but an incredibly intense one, and the actors, Tim Roth and Paul Rhys, play it really well, and the parallels and differences between the brothers. In terms of the usual depiction of artist's lives where the support from non-artists is presented as The Right Thing To Do (and morally wrong when it doesn't occur), here we have the support as the right thing to do, yes, but it's also clear that it means Theo will never have a life of his own, and the late attempt to have one with Jo and a baby is threatening to fall apart even before Vincent commits suicide.

Van Gogh as a painter is a gift for a director, of course, but Altman doesn't blindly recreate landscapes and people, which is why the transformative process of art works so well on screen here. (Case in point: the famous last painting of the landscape with crows. In the actual field Vincent paints, there are no crows. He adds them.) The shift from darker-lit Dutch scenes (Altman shot on location) to bright-lit French ones comes step by step, via Vincent's time in Paris (and Theo's flat, which is semi-dark lit) before the explosion of colour in Provence. (The sunflowers, introduced via camera push and pull, come across as sinister sirens, which is an interesting contrast to the way the DW episode sues them.) And you believe the other painters, too; Emile Bernard, sketching Vincent while Vincent is drawing someone else, and Gauguin perking up when hearing Vincent has an art dealer as a brother. (Gauguin didn't use to be a stockbroker for nothing.)

Not something to watch when you need cheering up, but far too energetic to be called depressing (even when it depicts depression); when most of Altman's other works occupy me intellectually but not emotionally, Vincent and Theo is the one Altman oeuvre that always makes me feel as well, and the Van Gogh fictionalisation I'd recommend to anyone interested in watching another. If, ototh, you want a primary source: all of Van Gogh's letters are online in English, complete with illustrations (the paintings and sketches he refers to, and scans of the original letters, and the few replies by Theo (and Jo) that still exist. To conclude with Van Gogh's own words: Well, the truth is, we cannot speak other than by our paintings. But still, my dear brother, there is this that I have always told you, and I repeat it once more with all the earnestness that can be imparted by an effort of a mind diligently fixed on trying to do as well as one can - I tell you again that I shall always consider that you are something other than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which even in the cataclysm retain their calm.

Current Mood: restless
Current Location: Munich

The last two days were thoroughly exhausting, but in a good way. On Friday, I had the chance to visit The Real Van Gogh - The Artist and his Letters, a fabulous new exhibition at the Royal Academy. Now as a veteran of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and our own Neue Pinakothek in Munich where some of the most famous Van Goghs are on display, I am pretty familiar with the ouevre outside of print and in real painting form. I've also read the letters to Theo. And yet this exhibition, covering Vincent from his early Dutch days till Auvers and his death, with paintings juxtaposed with letter manuscripts (often there are sketches of the paintings in question in the letters), felt fresh and amazing. You can follow the artistic development, you can see the way an idea becomes a painting, and how he tries to recapture this painting in words. That quite neat and small handwriting on paper that looks like the ones for exercise books sold even, and the brown colours of the Netherlands suddenly exploding into French light. So many still lifes which aren't actually the first thing you associate with Van Gogh. Two crabs, even, painted with the same bright yellow, orange, red like the sunflowers. Much later white roses which actually used to be pink, but Van Gogh used an unstable pigment, and now they faded to white. Theo sending him prints in black and white and Vincent doing his own coloured versions of these prints as paintings, guessing/choosing which colours to use. It's fantastic to watch.

I had some business as the British Library as well, so I used the opportunity to have lunch with

jesuswasbatman which was enjoyable as always. Then it was work time until the evening where the work included watching Twelfth Night with Richard Wilson as Malvolio, oh, the trial. (Does this stay in London have a Merlin theme?) It was a lovely production. The director depicted Illyria in the early 19th century, which meant everyone was in Greece-under-the Ottomans costumes, Orsino fancied himself and dressed like a Byronic hero, Viola and Sebastian were in Regency outfits as well, and the backround was a Greek ruin; it felt as if we were stranded in one of the travel epics Byron & Co. made fashionable, which worked amazingly well. The cast was in fine form. I've seen Twelfth Night productions which were incredibly depressing, entirely focused on the darker sides of the play, and Twelfth Night productions which played it completely comedic, but this was a good balance. Richard Wilson's Malvolio was pompous enough you could root for a prank against him, but his suffering in the second part was not played for laughs, and in the scenes with the Fool he never lost his dignity, so, like Olivia, one ended up feeling sorry for him and seeing him as abused. Speaking of Olivia, she was played with zest and a lot of energy. I haven't seen an Olivia yet who reacted to the big twins revelation with a lusty glee that had the thought "Threesome!" practically spelled out on her head, and the audience laughed and applauded her for it. (Incidentally, I thought the threesome possibility occured to Orsino as well, albeit a bit later.) I seem to recall there was some Twelfth Night fanfic in Yuletide which I haven't had the chance to read yet; I must do so now. (Someone not available or thinking of threesomes was poor Antonio; during Feste's final song, one saw him depart alone, like that other Antonio the pining outsider to the happy ending, but not the only one, as the whole sequence ended with Malvolio.)

Saturday, i.e. yesterday, the weather had changed and it was sunny throughout, which was great because I spent most of it outdoors. Near Hampton Court, which was one of the reasons why I had been there earlier, on Thursday. This time, it wasn't for fun but work, yet of the enjoyable variety. At the end of which I was pretty exhausted, but I shall leave you with the sight that made up for it: