Sonal Pandya
Mumbai, 20 Oct 2017 16:00 IST
Updated: 10 Nov 2017 18:30 IST
The film beautifully delves into the aftermath of celebrated artist Vincent van Gogh’s death by questioning the events that led to his apparent suicide.
Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, co-writers and directors of Loving Vincent, combined the murky details of the artist's death in 1890 (did the tortured Dutchman actually commit suicide?) with an ambitious tribute to his style of work.
The film uses the performances of artistes to investigate and dissect the life and death of van Gogh and employs talented painters (around 115 of them) to painstakingly paint over each frame. The paintings are inspired from van Gogh's own style from among some of his famous portraits and landscapes.
Vincent van Gogh struggled with mental illness his whole life and found his life’s calling with art at age 28. Until his death in France at 37 from an apparent suicide (a self-inflicted gunshot wound), he produced over 850 oil paintings and over 1,000 drawings and sketches. Labelled the father of modern art, he only sold one painting in his lifetime.
Kobiela and Welchman’s imaginative film opens, a year after van Gogh's suicide, with a reluctant Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), son of postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd). Joseph wishes that the last letter written by van Gogh (Anastazja Seweryn) to his brother Theo (Cezary Lukaszewicz) be finally delivered and it should be Armand who completes the task.
Begrudgingly, Armand agrees and sets off on a journey to walk in van Gogh’s footsteps as he spent his last days in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, in the care of Dr Paul Gachet (Jerome Flynn), who had a Salieri-Mozart type of relationship with the artist.
As Armand spends more time in the small French town, he becomes convinced that, tormented as he was, the great artist could not have killed himself. He talks to Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor Tomlinson), whose family owns the boarding house where van Gogh stayed, to the boatman (Aidan Turner) who observed van Gogh’s interactions with the townspeople, and the beautiful Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan), Dr Gachet’s daughter, who appreciated his genius.
Armand’s simple task of delivering a letter becomes more important to him as he wants to honour both Vincent and Theo (who died six months after his brother). In trying to understand the artist’s state of mind in his final days, Armand is also trying to come to terms with the loss of a great painter.
Loving Vincent is made up of 65,000 frames of oil paintings influenced by van Gogh’s own works. There are odes to his self-portrait and to his world-famous ‘The Starry Night’, and the real-life characters in the film are referenced from the over 850 paintings he made in the last decade of his life. The events in the present, as Armand investigates, are shown in colour while those of the past are shown in black and white.
The only jarring aspect in Loving Vincent is the use of the actors’ natural accents (mostly from the United Kingdom) for a story set largely in France. But after a while one becomes so immersed in the world Kobiela and Welchman have created that it feels as if one is living in van Gogh's world. Loving Vincent also makes a compelling case for alternative events presented in the film. The end credits back up all the claims they have made in the narrative.
Meet Hemali Vadalia, the Indian artist on world's first fully painted animation Loving Vincent
Loving Vincent also has an interesting India connection. Two Indian painters, Hemali Vadalia and Shuchi Muley, worked on the film in Gdansk, Poland. They were part of a global group of artists who came together to bring to life van Gogh’s story to the world.
Today, Vincent’s paintings hang in the world’s most respected museums and galleries and his works have sold for astronomical numbers. But his life as an artist was harrowed and difficult. Loving Vincent, the title based on his affectionate signature to Theo in his frequent letters, is a devoted tribute to a tormented artist.
Loving Vincent was screened at the 19th MAMI Mumbai Film Festival on 18 October 2017.