This is a competent rendering of the last weeks in the life of the fine arts painter Vincent Van Gogh in the rivertown Auvers-sur-Oise northwest of Paris. It's strength is its locations that are very authentic and the French personalities and settings that Van Gogh experienced and that would be lacking in any film not set in France and likely made by a Frenchman. There are plenty of innocuous conversations, luncheons and garden and nature walks. The most interesting relationship in the film is between Vincent and Dr. Guichet who is physician, arts patron and friend to the artist. They live on opposite ends of town - the doctor and his daughter living in a large house surrounded by greenery and warbling birdsong and the transient artist who sets himself up in a gray garret by the train station with pot-bellied and mustachioed worker types living with their hard and testy wives.
While this production misses the mark in many ways - Dutronc's Van Gogh lacks a certain physical and verbal intensity to be expected in the artist - and there is the ongoing sense that we are on a controlled and clinical 1990s film set instead of in Auvers in 1890- this is probably the closest art aficionados will get to the story unless it is re-told using many of the realistic elements found in this film but with a better narrative and performative versimilitude. Dutronc as Van Gogh, perhaps to his credit, has no sense of celebrity or speciality in the film and the director re-inforces the blandness of events - even Van Gogh's "accident" with a pistol which ends the artist's life at age 37 years. If bland is to be read as "unexpected" or "surprised" by Van Gogh's suicidal tendencies (as with his jump in the river at an outdoor social), it makes little impact.
I generally enjoy French films for their pacing, French language and thematic and visual materials. This is one more French film par excellence (the dance scene at the café-concert is especially inspired and quirky). However, Pialat's Van Gogh is a little slow and not just because of impatient American sensibility. If you enjoy Van Gogh's art, there is very little painting in the movie as if Van Gogh was more occupied with other things such as women. This is aggravating as these last months of his life in Auvers was an especially productive time for his painting. Even if you enjoy French films and bio-pics this version may be better than bearable but is not completely satisfying. Settings are realistic - for example, the artist's garret where he was taken to die is "spot on." But the story is completely imaginative and personal and not wholly successful for that fact since the subject is Vincent Van Gogh and not someone who is either fictional or innocuous. Van Gogh is doing a marketing service for Pialat's filmmaking as much as Pialat is re-presenting the famous post-impressionist artist to audiences.
In this way the film is misleading - it sets out to be realistic in its settings but its story could be on the same level in terms of historical truth as A Sunday in the Country (the old artist in that film is not Renoir but...) In Van Gogh, performances are professional but lack cohesion. The film disappoints on the levels described but it is for now by far the best interpretation we francophiles and art lovers have on the subject of this endlessly fascinating and mysterious artist.
