by Allan Fish
(France 1991 159m) DVD1
Study of the artist as a…man
d/w Maurice Pialat ph Gilles Henry, Jacques Loiseleux, Emmanuel Machuel ed Hélène Viard, Yann Dedet, Nathalie Hubert m Jacques Dutronc, André Bernot, J.M.Bourget, P.Revedy art Katia Wyszkop, Philippe Palut cos Edith Vesperini
Jacques Dutronc (Vincent Van Gogh), Alexandra London (Marguerite), Bernard le Coq (Théo), Gérard Séty (Gachet), Corinne Bourdon (Jo), Elsa Zylberstein (Cathy), Leslie Azzouli (Adeline Ravoux), Jacques Vidal (Ravoux),
Is there any painter in history we feel like we know more than Van Gogh? And there is very much the paradox, for how much do we really know him? Most of us know him from Lust for Life, the story of Vincent as told by namesake Vincente Minnelli. We all know that Vincent, the Vincent of Kirk Douglas in complete anguish, wrestling with himself as if each painting was like tearing flesh from his already malnourished body. It’s still an impressive performance. There’s also a very subtle one from James Donald as his brother Théo, far better than the grandstanding of Tony Quinn as Gauguin. Let us also not forget the colour hues in Freddie Young’s photography, painterly in themselves.
For many years Vincente’s Vincent remained sacred. Then we had Paul Cox’s semi-animated take with John Hurt’s letter readings making us wish he’d played the role in the 1970s. In 1990 Robert Altman gave us Vincent and Theo with Tim Roth and Paul Rhys – both excellent – but the film itself felt more threadbare than the artist. Into the new millennium and we had a series of sketches from Andy Serkis in Schama’s The Power of Art that captured something of the man, and then there was that episode of Doctor Who. Yes, it was all tosh, but Tony Curran was quite lovely as Vincent and if the smile he gives on opening his shutters in the morning to see Karen Gillan smiling bathed in sunlight was maybe more than Vincent could really have mustered, it was a sight to make the hardiest depressant melt.
Long before all that, while Altman’s film was still playing in the States, Maurice Pialat set about his own film on Vincent. He chose an actor in Jacques Dutronc who looked nothing like the real Van Gogh. He doesn’t even bother to adopt a beard and the whole ear-lipping incident isn’t even depicted. Moreover, his film doesn’t do the full journey of the artist, merely the final destination, the last 60 days or so. It’s appropriate then that we first see him getting off a train at Auvers-sur-Oise, for he’ll never get on another. Vincent was in the last chance saloon even then and probably knew it, spending the last remaining months trying to find something worth clinging on to.
What’s perhaps more revolutionary is we don’t really get the torment of the artist, the genius waiting to get out. Pialat doesn’t seem to even take it as fact that Van Gogh was a genius, preferring instead to make it a study of a man who committed suicide. It’s all the more intriguing bearing in mind that within 12 months we’d have two very different portraits of artists as old men, Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse and Erice’s opaque The Quince Tree Sun. It has nothing really in common with either of them. Pialat is more interested in the sense of Auvers, the visual texture of the world he lived and died in. It was the age of Impressionism, lest we not forget, so it’s instead Renoir – père et fils, if we’re being honest – and to other films like Ophuls’ Le Plaisir and Becker’s Casque d’Or we see echoed. For a film about a man in a dark place, there’s a lovely nostalgic golden glow to many scenes and a reasonable amount of joy. We see Vincent eating, drinking and seducing and discussing his art very disparagingly; “he can’t die for my smudges that’ll never be worth a cent”, he says of Théo to his wife. Leaving aside physical inconsistences, Dutronic is quite magnificent as Vincent. He may not be Vincent as we want to think of him, but it’s a real performance of great magnitude. The supports aren’t bad either, especially the girls, a mixture of doughty washer-women types and seeming exiles from the Maison Close. In the end, we see more clearly that the old line about death being a great career move, while cynical, does have more than a basis in truth.
