Van Gogh

I had the joy of living another one of those events that give beauty to the life of a cinephile. My first encounter with Jacques Dutronc dates about half a century ago when I was listening to the shows on Radio Luxembourg behind the Iron Curtain. He was and remains perhaps the best French rocker. (Sorry, Johnny Hallyday!) Vincent Van Gogh is a huge artist, one of those who changed the course of art history. But I didn't know that Dutronc played Vincent in a biopic. But most of all, I didn't know Maurice Pialat. Many biographical films have been made about Van Gogh and will probably be made more. 'Van Gogh' made in 1991 by Pialat is a film different from all the others. I even wonder if it should be considered a biopic. Maybe it would be more appropriate to call it an anti-biopic. I have not seen other films by Maurice Pialat, and I intend to recover this unforgivable ignorance of mine as soon as I can find other films of his. In this movie, Pialat seems to desire to make cinema as Vincent created. The painter did not resume to replicate the world around him as the academics had done, nor to observe and reinterpret it through his eyes and vision as an artist as the Impressionists did. Instead, he started from reality and created something new. Likewise, Maurice Pialat starts from the ultra-well-known biography of the painter and the well-documented period of the last months of his life to create on screen his own vision of the man and of the artist Van Gogh and of the people and the world around him.

The trivially known details are missing. There is no cut ear or grotesque bandage around the head. There is no insistence on the mystery of the fatal shooting. But the essence is present. With his physique and especially his shaken psyche, the artist crushed by the lack of understanding and recognition of his art by the surrounding society took refuge in the last months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, being treated by Dr. Gachet (Gérard Séty) . The connection with his brother Theo (Bernard Le Coq), as reflected in their correspondence, goes through a stormy period, with ups and downs, as in his brother's life we witness the appearance of his wife and of his first and only child. Refused, perhaps feeling exiled from the bourgeois world, Vincent Van Gogh finds dialogue partners in women and in the simple people in the village whose portraits he paints. It is a period of feverish creation, as the end approaches the intensity of his artistic burning increases. The closer he gets to the end the more exuberant his works. Landscapes are on fire, nature is in convulsion, reflecting the storms inside. Pialat adds here another dimension, undocumented but human and credible. Van Gogh may be a depressed person, but not a passive one, he is very much alive. He lives intensely, eats, drinks, and has relationships with several women. Some are prostitutes, but not only, and at least one of the connections, the one with Dr. Gachet's young daughter (Alexandra London) could promise a chance to regain his balance. But it is too late, and perhaps the awareness of this impossible situation is what precipitates his end.

True to his conception of creating something new and not of just putting on screen the biography, Maurice Pialat made no effort to make Jacques Dutronc look like Van Gogh, nor did he force him to grow the iconic red beard. Dutronc's role is far from what other actors have imagined, from Kirk Douglas to Willem Dafoe. It is actually the refusal of conformist adaptation, the simplicity of human relationships, the thirst for life and creation, the power to love that bring him closer to what Vincent Van Gogh may have been in reality. Among the other actors (all very good) in the film I would mention Gérard Séty with a complex and ambiguous portrait of Dr. Gachet and Elsa Zylberstein in the role of a beautiful and sensual prostitute. The scenes of the parties in the brothels of Paris and of the meetings between Vincent and Theo, either in Dr. Gachet's house or on the banks of the Oise, are also very well directed. The frames seem to be taken from Manet's paintings. Women's costumes, dresses and hairstyles descend from Monet's paintings. The figures and bodies of the women come from Renoir. Visually Maurice Pialat quotes the masters of Impressionism and not Vincent. In fact, from his art, we see from time to time only glimpses when a painting appears in the frame. We see the art in character instead. Vincent's substance can found in his behavior. This unique film reconstructs the man Van Gogh from the essence of his art.